Compu-Tech Intl.

What You Get When You Invest in an Employee Time Clock

October 17, 2015 by · Leave a Comment 

By Allied Time

The next time you have some money in your budget to spend on improving your company, you’ll want to look into a timeclock for your organization. If you’re a bit underwhelmed by the idea, it’s not surprising. When it comes to getting more from you employees, there are countless options. People pay huge sums to have gurus come in and talk to their people. Others may actually physically alter their facilities—something that isn’t inexpensive either.AlliedTime3

So when you hear that buying timeclocks will produce serious results, it makes sense that you’d scoff at the idea.

However, the evidence is there. When people aren’t given parameters about what’s expected from them, it becomes too easy for even the hardest working and most honest of employees to start slipping. Even worse, when these employees are keeping themselves disciplined, they’ll often find that some of their coworkers aren’t. This is how discontent grows amongst your ranks.

Introduce clocks to monitor your staff and everyone wins. You’ll soon find that people are getting more done and feel happier during their work hours. There’s just no way you’ll find a more affordable way to get these kinds of results from your people. Plus, once you’ve made the investment, these results are yours forever.

At Allied Time, the bottom line is making more of your company’s most valuable asset. With employee time clocks, you can make sure that every dime you spend on your staff is well worth it.

Grace Hopper and the Origin of “Debugging”

October 2, 2015 by · Leave a Comment 

By Phineas Upham

Any IT technician who debugs some code can thank Grace Brewster Murray Hopper for coining the term. She was a high-level computer programmer for the Navy throughout the World War II era of American military history, and she was one of the earliest advocates of machine learning.

Grace began her interest in computers at an early age. She had a deep curiosity about the inner workings of an alarm clock. Before her mother realized why all the alarm clocks in the house were “broken”, Grace had dismantled seven to figure out how they worked inside.

She attended Vassar, after some difficulty in the application process, but took a hiatus to join the United States Naval Reserve. Weighing in at 105 pounds, Hopper needed an exemption because she was below the Navy’s minimum weight standard. She trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School, and graduated in 1944. She served in the Mark I Computer programming division, which functioned something like an analytical engine for predictions. It was to be used to assist the Allied war effort towards the end of World War II.

Hopper was one of the first people who wrote a compiler for a computer. By 1952, the compiler was operational, and her colleagues were astounded. Prior to that moment, PCs were used as little more than glorified calculators.

Hopper also popularized the idea that computer programming should be written in a language that was easy to understand, rather than a machine language. Her ideas helped create the foundation for COBOL, which was one of the earliest high-level programming languages in computing history.

If you’re curious about the “de-bug” term, it involved a literal de-bugging. Hopper pulled a living moth from a computer at one point, as it had been interfering with the delicate circuitry inside.


About the Author: Phineas Upham is an investor at a family office/ hedgefund, where he focuses on special situation illiquid investing. Before this position, Phin Upham was working at Morgan Stanley in the Media and Telecom group. You may contact Phin on his Phineas Upham website or Twitter page.