Service life cycle in a nutshell

Effective service governance requires that you understand the complete service life cycle. A service starts life as a proposal.This fledgling service is to caputured by the governance group to ensure that it's unique and also has the potential to be reused by many users. The next stage requires the proposal to be fleshed out and a project plan begins its development. Keeping track of and publishing the scheduled services is important for resource planning and also allowing other consumers or the prospective consumers to see what is to be expected. Next the service goes into development. And the service governance group may well want to inspect the development of predefined quality quotes. At the early stages of the service rollout, the group may also want to provide active design support for these projects. If all goes well the service will go into production. As it is now widely available, its details should be published, for instance, in a repository. The server group will also be advised to track the consumers, the usage and the performance of the service. These metrics can be used to monitor the performance of the program as a whole. The group also need to deal with change management and incident management. At some time, the sevice needs to come out of production. It's advisable first to set a duplicated state and notify all users that the service may need to be retired. This may cause disputes and these need to be resolved. Finally, the service is retired and all references to it and registries in the repository need to be removed. This is just the lifecycle of one service. You have to remember however  that there are many duifferent services being developed, each with different projects each of which have their own life cycle. To manage this complexity, you have to have good governance processes in place and also the corresponding tools to be able to maintain or complete the service life cycle.

Political party radicals

The Policitical Party Radicals ( De Politieke Partij Radikalen) were a Progressive Dutch Party  at first oriented towards Christianity principles. The PPR played a modest role in the history of Dutch Politics and originated from the rupture of a small section of the Catholic People's Party (Katholieke Volkspartij). The PPR as a political institution totally faded into the Green Left in 1991.

NES Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair

Never felt so safe with a bat my entire life.

Staring at the cover art is the best part of this "game"

Dragon's Lair (ドラゴンズレア) is a side-scrolling platform game for the NES released in 1991 loosely based onthe 1983 arcade classic of the same name. Being a side-scroller inspired by game of quick-time events, the movements of the main character were designed to be executed in slow motion, as if the player had to make a decision about which action he should do in order to progress in the game. As a result, anyone new to the game is bound to die a frustratingly high number of times to the point that it becomes almost anti-ethic to make a game whose protagonist can be killed anytime at a wink. By the way, the main character's name is Dirk the Daring. Not that it matters. Actually, it does matter in that his primary means of attack involves throwing daggers, and dirk is a kind of dagger. He can also upgrade his weapon to a forward-flying axe and fireballs, but these require finding a hidden powerup which only appear by using the candle. The controls are reversed from mainstream NES games. Not that a game this orthodox had anything to do remotely close to mainstream to begin with. This is quite a weird game, but weird in a negative way, as if it doesn't arouse curiosity from the wretched souls playing it at all. Again, as soon as you start playing this game you'll feel like you just want to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible. Every virtual centimetre in the game is fraught with hazards that all instantly kill. You won't ever see a game in which the hero si so effortelessly killed off. This makes the enemies seem badass in comparison with the dolt you play as. The game does have a sluggish pace, but the stage enemies and threats wherein wind up moving slightly faster than the plodding hero, whom often has no time to fashion an effective course of action to survive the many ordeals. Coupled with the fact that the game offers no checkpoints, only five lives with no way to replenish them, neither continues nor passwords or a saving feature, the game becomes unbeatable unless you're thick enough to play it enough times to commit practically the whole thing to memory. You literally need to memorise every step you take through the whole thing. Go ahead and try it while overlooking this game's glaring flaws. You're in for some deep-level, soul-slashing frustration that will leave you scarred for good.

Levels

• The Drawbridge
• The Dungeon
• The Elevator
• The Mines
• The Reaper's Domain
• The Dragon's Lair
• The Lizard King's Throne Room (optional stage)

Ninth Circle (Treachery)

The Ninth and last circle of Dante's Divine Comedy is ringed by titans from classical events, including the Bible and mankind's history.  The meaning anchored to the likeness of those sentenced to the Ninth Circle is often attributed to pride and that taking inordinate pride is wrong, which is often thought of as the sin that takes men the most astray from their path to righteousness. The titans hover on a ledge above the ninth circle in order to be seen from the waist up. Among them are Nimrod, Ephialtes, Tityos and typhon. The giant Antaeus (the only one unbound with chains) drops Dante and Virgil down into the pit that constitutes the Ninth Circle of Hell.

The traitors are set apart from the fraudulent in that their deeds  indicated that they betrayed the trust put upon them while they were part of a relationship or that they scammed their partners out of something valuable enough to warrant divine punishment. The traitors are rounded up into 4 concentric zones:

1- family ties betrayal
2- community ties betrayal
3- betrayal of guests
4- liege lords betrayal

The accomplish the betrayours' punishment, they are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus, with each set of perpetrators encased in ice to progressively greater depths.

Round 1 is named Caïna, after Cain, Adam's son who slayed his own brethren out of jealously. Traitors to kindred are here immersed in the up to their chins. Mordred, who launched an attack on his uncle in King Arthur, is quickly noticed as one of the traitors here.

Round 2 is named Antenora, after Antenor of Troy (not Bathsheba's love interest, mind you) backstabbed his own acropolis in order to render it vulnerable to Greek attacks. Political entities traitors are subjected to the same prison as the traitors in the Caïna circle.

Round 3 is Ptolomaea, after Ptolemy, Abubus' son, who invited Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to a feast in a ploy to slaughter them. Their scourge is remarkably starker than the previous 2 rings on account that relationships with guests to one's house is entirely optional, without any compliance rule binding them together. 

 Round 4 is named after Judas Iscariot: Judecca, reserved for traitors to their lords and entirelt confined in an icy prison "distorted in all conceivable positions".

In the very centre of Hell, condemned for committing the ultimate sin, is Satan, who is a giant, terrifying beast with three faces, one red, one black, and one a pale yellow:

    he had three faces: one in front bloodred;
    and then another two that, just above
    the midpoint of each shoulder, joined the first;
    and at the crown, all three were reattached;
    the right looked somewhat yellow, somewhat white;
    the left in its appearance was like those
    who come from where the Nile, descending, flows.

Satan is waist deep in ice, weeping tears from his six eyes, and beating his six wings as if trying to escape, although the icy wind that emanates only further ensures his imprisonment (as well as that of the others in the ring). Each face has a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor. Brutus and Cassius are feet-first in the left and right mouths respectively, for their involvement in the assassination of Julius Caesar – an act which, to Dante, represented the destruction of a unified Italy and the killing of the man who was divinely appointed to govern the world. In the central, most vicious mouth is Judas Iscariot, the namesake of Round 4 and the betrayer of Jesus. Judas is receiving the most horrifying torture of the three traitors: his head gnawed by Satan's mouth, and his back being forever skinned by Satan's claws. What is seen here is an inverted trinity: Satan is impotent, ignorant, and full of hate, in contrast to the all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving nature of God.

The role of management in corporate governance

Business nature has changed dramatically  in the latest decades. The reasons behind such changes are the most diverse. Some the main reasons driving this trend may be globalisation, consolidation of great enterprise groups and markets, technolgical resources growth, fast information dissemination, among other factors.These changes also call for improvements in the management methods in said organisations. With this context in mind, a brief overview of business management will be presented, along with the evolutionary path it has taken to this day.

Before delving into the inner workings of corporate governance, a basic understanding of management and managers as related to businesses is in order. According to Drucker and Maciarello (2010), a business organisation may hold onto survival without formal administrative planning. Furthermore, this very company might remain on the market for a considerable length of time and even experience some growth. However, at one point or another in its growth process the business transations it has to handle will become too difficult to be conducted in an orderly manner. A company's complexity becomes too apparent the moment that its
operational activities need to be done through coordinated action and effective communication amongst its stakeholders. This alone explains why management plays such an meaningful role even in small scale businesses from a profiting viewpoint. The key-factor for the existence of management and managers is the business' complexity level. 

Through this rationale, it would be right to assert that an organisation needs to crank up its capacity for management as soon as its complexity level begins to reach steep heights. Under this optics, it becomes clear that management is best understood as study field of its own, not just as a simple working tool to serve
organisations.

A company's manager is someone accountable for the work output of other people in a corporation. Those who have executive roles but aren't responsible for leading other people are considered individual clerks as their work bears direct influence on the company's financial outcome. Individual clerks perform some task
which is relevant to the company but without being part of a team. From a cultural point of view, managers have higher social standing within an organisation since they are fully responsible for the work of others, which in turn gives them more power and auhtority over others.

Placing greater importance on managers' shoulders over the remainder of the flesh cogs may come across as a skewed vision of reality, but they're actually in charge of planning, organising, integrating, measuring and training of personnel. If we are to probe deeper, we will realise that both managers and individual
clerks perform such activities, bar the last.

Taking into account the core functions of a manager, we conclude that this aligns perfectly with the company's usual mission, which can only come to fruition through thorough planning and goal setting. Ways to reach these goals start to be framed into reality through planning, which also sees to it that communication is often practiced in order to allow harmony to help accomplish whatever is stated in the plan.

Once the planning stage is over, we can move on to the organising of the work to be done. While planning allows for the identification of what has to be achieved, the organising stage features the actual breaking up of activities into subactivities, so that staff can contribute evenly and tasks become easily manageable.

Once the previous steps come to a finish, the people best suited for each activity are identified, integrated into the team and motivated to attain the expected results. The act of integrating relies heavily on the manager's communication skills. Unsurprisingly, communication is a most useful working tool for any 
effective employee in a management position.

Measuring is also a part of any managing routine. In order to exert any sort of quality control over what is to be accomplished, there should a standard way to determine what are the prime conditions for a product or service to be considered desirable for consumption.

The manager who dutifully does the planning, organising, integrating and measuring activities is holding sway over others in the company. Through the impact from his decisions, it is estimated that this manager is directly or indirectly contributing to the development of people involved in said activities. There is no way an effective manager could not exert any kind of influence over the people under his rule.

The revelance of his influence over other personnel has attained even greater import at this point in history as information has become one of a company's most valuable assets. Organisations have become ever more reliant on knowledge for proper conduction of business practices and even for assuring their survival on the
market. This is manifested in the importance that staff development has in a manager's role.

DMAIC

DMAIC (define, measure, analyse, improve, control) means the stages of process management. DMAIC is the key process of the Six Sigma approach to quality management and is used to give processes a stable nature according to the Six Sigma performance levels. DMAIC is used for the improvement of existing products, whereas for new products, DMADV is used and, for new processes, DMAEC.

Illustration of the DMAIC steps. Picture from wikipedia.org

It's mostly defined according to whom the customers are and what are their needs which the processes have to cater to, which is ciritical for the customers' expectations. It's in the measure stage that the current baselines are determined for improvement, which in the analyse stage much brainstorming usually follows in order to find out about the root cause of a problem or some common hindrance. The improve step sees the development of actual possibilities for improvement and the problems they are addressed to, while it's in the control stage in which the actual processes and thought-out improvement are implemented to sustain gains.

Chart summarising every step of the DMAIC cycle. source: http://ualberta.ca

Academese lifestyle

One could rant about it all day.

If college isn't a training ground for a country's elite and the true cream of the crop, it's just an institution devoid of actual use and meaning. But again, the current elite isn't worth extolling, like they aren't even accountable for their lack of touch with reality.
 
It's virtually impossible to regard Academia as an organisation concerned about finding the truth or preserve knowledge. It used to be, back when professors were ministers or theologians. In this day and age, academia can be viewed as a ball, for which the members dress up in the fanciest  of garments, conveniently designed to aid in climbing the social ladder as high as they can. In the long run, it's just pretentiousness and social climbing. But at least for those who are good at it they can greatly enhance their academic performance.

This almost makes me want to applaud the kids who drop out of college to pursue greater things in life. Sometimes even I flirt with this possibility.

Experience Curve

As a concept designed by the Boston Consultancy Group, it bears significant distinction from the widely known learning curve effect, although they do bear some similarities common to each other.

Many a day it has been a commonly known fact that time spent labouring away at a task tended to see a gradual decrease as the procedures were repeated at a rate of about 10% to 15% as experience went up twofold.


However, the learning curve effect didn't attract broad recognition in other arenas, being confined to military drills and so-called direct labour. But tasks under constant threat of change from service design managers could not just become the subject of such a strict method of repetitive performance. There would be too much incompatibility for non-perfunctory tasks to take in the learning curve effect in its entirety.

 The first attempt by the Boston Consultancy Group to actually flesh out the understanding behind  experience curve consisted of accounting for cost behaviour over time. Successfully cutting down on costs could at best assure survival as a lesser competitor in the market. The links binding together competitive profitability and market share were too glaringly obvious to be overlooked. The rationale behind the learning curve seemed too plausible an explanation to describe the observed experiment. Apparently, the race to catch up to long-established competitors was always down the cost curve.

This is,in short, how the experience curve works. It is basically the idea that costs will eventually drop as a task is repeated over and over, implying that the staff doing it fine tune their skills to perform better overall. It doesn't for work routines subject to changes. Its basic premise is that people tend to get better at what they do if they do this enough times a day to realise more efficient patterns to accomplishing the desire end. 

Total Quality Management

Continuous improvement in all areas of an organisation should be a routine process, deeply assimilated in the organisational culture, as opposed to viewing it as a short-term goal. Through a progressive perpective, it's goal is to bring about meaningful and positive changes in the attitudes, practices and systems of the company. Total quality management is an offshoot of product quality, and as an approach to organisational improvement, it seeks to get every stakeholder involved, branching out to every organisational domain including , administration, communications, distribution, manufacturing, marketing, planning etc.

the ultimate solution to finding out windows version without booting

After obtaining access to the HDD's files through a live boot CD, go to C:\windows\system32 and search for a file called "ntoskrnl.exe". Ater this, right click on it and head to properties. Read the information and heed the details for the product version:

4.x: NT 4.x
5.0: Windows 2000
5.1: Windows XP
5.2: Windows 2003 Server or Windows XP-64-bit
6.0: Windows Vista
6.1: Windows 7
6.2; Windows 8

6.3: Windows 8.1

You can just as well open the file license.rtf in system32 and chek which version of windows you have installed on the computer. The file is in rich text format so it may be necessary to copy it to open it in a functional computer to read its contents.