The NCEES does now have a Computer Engineering option that looks much more reasonable for those of us that are more on that side of things. Sadly Oregon requires references from three licensed Engineers to apply. I have yet to run into anyone that is actually licensed (heck 90% of my coworkers haven't even taken the FE), likely because the CE option is very new.
While I was an undergrad student the department installed these in our labs, it is very frustrating to have the lights go out on you while soldering surface mount components. Late one evening (or early one morning) I decided I'd had enough so I poked around in the ceiling and bypassed the lighting controller.
Not quite as simple as a drinking bird but very effective.
> A peer and I once made the same comparison. We called ourselves digital maintenance men, because by and large that's what it is.
Myself and a friend of mine frequently refer to ourselves as code janitors, we are both well educated and work for Fortune 100 companies.
Unfortunately this is an easy position to get socked into. Companies generally want to make money, this generally requires staying on schedule, this means you get to inherit this lump of awful code/infrastructure $lastGuy left and beat on it until you meet your deadlines. No idea why $lastGuy left, he probably got a job at a competing company for $salary*1.2 where he will beat on some similar, yet different code for a while before moving again.
I live in Hillsboro and have no complaints, though I have hardware in one of those datacenters so I may be biased.
I think these articles are failing to account for the jobs created indirectly. I know a few folks that work for companies that have hardware in one of these local datacenters, in addition to traditional sysadmin jobs their duties include being on-call for hardware failures and the like. A at least one of these companies is fairly large and chose to come to Hillsboro and hire techs here because of the space available.
The Gulf of Mexico didn't "break Aunt Hilda's internet." Were Google to simply stop providing service to Verizon customers due to the way Verizon was doing business I guarantee you they would have half their customer base marching on the nearest customer service center.
Same here. I took VLSI Winter 2009 and we spent an inordinate amount of time studying and working on sub-threshold designs. Part of our final project (and final exam) was to produce a simulated and laid-out circuit using a sub-threshold supply. It's not very complicated, you just lower your clockspeed and source voltage, most of your existing circuits work just fine. The major problem is that they are now working at very low clockrates (KHz as opposed to MHz) which doesn't make too many people very excited.
I passed over both Assassin's Creed II and C&C 4 due to the DRM (both of which resulted in canceled preorders). After hearing the horror stories about the more recent DRM "innovations" the vast majority of my gamer friends have followed suit.
Personally I won't purchase Assassin's Creed II until a crack or patch is released that resolved the DRM problem. If that means waiting until the game is a $5 steam special I'm fine with that, I don't have to play a game the instant it comes out.
What is so annoying about this entire affair is that I am not a thief, pirate, rampant violator of intellectual property, etc. I just want to be able to use the software I purchase without my crappy Comcast connection compromising my single-player gaming experience. Is this too much to ask?
How do you explain something like Mirror's Edge then?
I love how people keep trotting this out as an example of how EA is not really as "boring" and formulaic as the community makes them out to be. That is the exception, not the rule. And they're making another one, so really EA just gained another formula to churn through every so-often.
Unfortunately the Intel 4004 is much less sophisticated than even the simplistic models I studied as an undergrad. Not to mention that real chips suffer from real compromises and real problems, something our academic fantasy-land models never had to deal with. The simple models allow the students to learn the important concepts (such as multi-cycle instructions, pipelining, caching) without having to worry about why it was implemented a certain way, the concepts are what counted.
In my computer architecture classes we at least looked at the IA32 architecture but it was more of a space-filler and not a primary focus, our professor was heavily into MIPS.
The tx2xxx series also tends to ship with Broadcom wireless cards that have an alarming failure rate, we've had to replace untold numbers of these.
Between this and the problems with most of the rest of the HP laptops we see coming in at work my opinion of HP has gone from bad to worse in the last couple years.
Even more worrying is the American Express website - they have a 6 - 8 character limit and disallow special characters. They had better lock people out after a few bad tries as there are a frighteningly limited number of passwords you can come up with that fit those restrictions.
The websites both have terrible usability issues as well but you would think that they would at least be a little concerned about security.
The problem is IT guys and PHB's that think RAID=Backup.
Bullshit. If that's true where you work then you'd better be looking for some new IT guys. In my time in IT I have never seen a RAID without a tape jukebox or some other backup system behind it.
Now were you to qualify that as "the unqualified scabs doing IT for most small businesses" that could be a different story.
I am not saying your current games are bad - I have no experience with them
You've saved yourself some money and hours of crappy gameplay then. Assassin's Creed was almost enjoyable (if it hadn't been so buggy), other than that I haven't really enjoyed an Ubisoft title since Chaos Theory (released in 2005). I had been looking forward to Splinter Cell Conviction, however with the way they keep delaying it and changing things by the time we get it I doubt it will resemble the original franchise at all.
A note to game developers: Just because a franchise is successful doesn't mean that it will survive a substantial change in gameplay like we got with Double Agent. Furthermore, after a bomb like Double Agent it would be wise to return more towards the style that popularized your game in the first place before branching out in new directions. I'm not asking for EA Games Madden-esque repetition here and not saying that taking franchises in new creative directions is not good, but when you fail so badly take it back to base before you try again.
Also: If you notice game sales going down it probably has a correlation to your games sucking, regardless of the actual effects of piracy. Since the industry has pretty much stopped offering demos often times the only way to try a game is to download it first. If it sucks why would you bother purchasing it? "Better" DRM isn't going to help you on this front, however games that don't suck would. =)
The general market is easily entertained and companies will sell to them as much as possible. Why spend big $$$ to please the/. geek living in his mother's basement when you can pay a college dropout next to nothing to develop a series of pointless little web games that will appeal to a much larger (and less discerning) audience.
This is the same logic used in the film industry, though in all fairness the film industry is at least starting to realize that there are more geeks than previously thought and trying to compensate for it (see also: LOTR, Batman, Watchmen).
I find it disappointing that the game industry has moved from the model where they kept having to innovate to stay one step ahead of the competition and into a realm where they simply churn out the same game over and over without really adding much or even bothering to differentiate their game from the competition. Unfortunately the game industry has figured out that a large portion of the videogame market is easily entertained, just as is the case with film audiences (Transformers 2 anybody?). If they keep stamping Madden 20xx on the cover of a game odds are they'll continue making money, regardless of the actual quality or content.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I've gone from being an avid gamer to barely touching games at all, mainly from lack of interest. There just aren't many good new games coming out.
It's worth noting that pointing the extortion racket out during communications intended to get you removed from said blacklist will result in you never hearing another word from the people at SORBS. Funny thing though: After referring (numerous) complaining customers to SORBS as the source of all their woes I found myself removed from the blacklists in short order. Odd how that works.
We have had issues with users taking our OS CDs/DVDs from our helpdesk either accidentally or intentionally. A few months ago we set out to create custom labels for all our discs to make it quite clear that we didn't want them walking off.
A user walked in a couple weeks after we had fixed her computer and stated that they wanted very much to use their optical drive but she was afraid to take out the disc labeled in large font "DO NOT REMOVE."
Very good idea! In fact why don't we hand.org to Oregon while we're at it, surely they will give that TLD much better use than the legions of lackluster sites infesting that TLD.
I don't think he is so much claiming that FreeBSD is superior but that it's license is superior and folks may have to cope with the rest in order to escape GPLv3.
Good thing too, I would have had to cry BS if he was really claiming that it's better as an OS.:)
I operate a small hosting business and agree with you 100%, don't buy hosting from someone unless they have physical access to the box and know what they are doing.
After hearing so many sob stories of resold hosting dropping off the face of the planet and customers left adrift I made the move from a VPS and colocated my business with a reputable provider downtown. In addition to the peace of mind it provides me and my customers I've also been free of the the service outages and "oops" moments that were frequent with the VPS provider I had been with previously.
The Voyager probes are 15.5 and 12.5 billion kilometers from the sun and Comcast can connect to them, yet still couldn't get a connection out to my house in relative suburbia until a couple years ago?
Slashdot Mirror
The NCEES does now have a Computer Engineering option that looks much more reasonable for those of us that are more on that side of things. Sadly Oregon requires references from three licensed Engineers to apply. I have yet to run into anyone that is actually licensed (heck 90% of my coworkers haven't even taken the FE), likely because the CE option is very new.
While I was an undergrad student the department installed these in our labs, it is very frustrating to have the lights go out on you while soldering surface mount components. Late one evening (or early one morning) I decided I'd had enough so I poked around in the ceiling and bypassed the lighting controller.
Not quite as simple as a drinking bird but very effective.
> A peer and I once made the same comparison. We called ourselves digital maintenance men, because by and large that's what it is.
Myself and a friend of mine frequently refer to ourselves as code janitors, we are both well educated and work for Fortune 100 companies.
Unfortunately this is an easy position to get socked into. Companies generally want to make money, this generally requires staying on schedule, this means you get to inherit this lump of awful code/infrastructure $lastGuy left and beat on it until you meet your deadlines. No idea why $lastGuy left, he probably got a job at a competing company for $salary*1.2 where he will beat on some similar, yet different code for a while before moving again.
I live in Hillsboro and have no complaints, though I have hardware in one of those datacenters so I may be biased. I think these articles are failing to account for the jobs created indirectly. I know a few folks that work for companies that have hardware in one of these local datacenters, in addition to traditional sysadmin jobs their duties include being on-call for hardware failures and the like. A at least one of these companies is fairly large and chose to come to Hillsboro and hire techs here because of the space available.
The Gulf of Mexico didn't "break Aunt Hilda's internet." Were Google to simply stop providing service to Verizon customers due to the way Verizon was doing business I guarantee you they would have half their customer base marching on the nearest customer service center.
Same here. I took VLSI Winter 2009 and we spent an inordinate amount of time studying and working on sub-threshold designs. Part of our final project (and final exam) was to produce a simulated and laid-out circuit using a sub-threshold supply. It's not very complicated, you just lower your clockspeed and source voltage, most of your existing circuits work just fine. The major problem is that they are now working at very low clockrates (KHz as opposed to MHz) which doesn't make too many people very excited.
I passed over both Assassin's Creed II and C&C 4 due to the DRM (both of which resulted in canceled preorders). After hearing the horror stories about the more recent DRM "innovations" the vast majority of my gamer friends have followed suit.
Personally I won't purchase Assassin's Creed II until a crack or patch is released that resolved the DRM problem. If that means waiting until the game is a $5 steam special I'm fine with that, I don't have to play a game the instant it comes out.
What is so annoying about this entire affair is that I am not a thief, pirate, rampant violator of intellectual property, etc. I just want to be able to use the software I purchase without my crappy Comcast connection compromising my single-player gaming experience. Is this too much to ask?
How do you explain something like Mirror's Edge then?
I love how people keep trotting this out as an example of how EA is not really as "boring" and formulaic as the community makes them out to be. That is the exception, not the rule. And they're making another one, so really EA just gained another formula to churn through every so-often.
Unfortunately the Intel 4004 is much less sophisticated than even the simplistic models I studied as an undergrad. Not to mention that real chips suffer from real compromises and real problems, something our academic fantasy-land models never had to deal with. The simple models allow the students to learn the important concepts (such as multi-cycle instructions, pipelining, caching) without having to worry about why it was implemented a certain way, the concepts are what counted.
In my computer architecture classes we at least looked at the IA32 architecture but it was more of a space-filler and not a primary focus, our professor was heavily into MIPS.
Sarcasm much?
The tx2xxx series also tends to ship with Broadcom wireless cards that have an alarming failure rate, we've had to replace untold numbers of these.
Between this and the problems with most of the rest of the HP laptops we see coming in at work my opinion of HP has gone from bad to worse in the last couple years.
Even more worrying is the American Express website - they have a 6 - 8 character limit and disallow special characters. They had better lock people out after a few bad tries as there are a frighteningly limited number of passwords you can come up with that fit those restrictions.
The websites both have terrible usability issues as well but you would think that they would at least be a little concerned about security.
The problem is IT guys and PHB's that think RAID=Backup.
Bullshit. If that's true where you work then you'd better be looking for some new IT guys. In my time in IT I have never seen a RAID without a tape jukebox or some other backup system behind it.
Now were you to qualify that as "the unqualified scabs doing IT for most small businesses" that could be a different story.
An alarming lack of airborne greenhouse gasses leading to a dangerous trend of global cooling?
I am not saying your current games are bad - I have no experience with them
You've saved yourself some money and hours of crappy gameplay then. Assassin's Creed was almost enjoyable (if it hadn't been so buggy), other than that I haven't really enjoyed an Ubisoft title since Chaos Theory (released in 2005). I had been looking forward to Splinter Cell Conviction, however with the way they keep delaying it and changing things by the time we get it I doubt it will resemble the original franchise at all.
A note to game developers: Just because a franchise is successful doesn't mean that it will survive a substantial change in gameplay like we got with Double Agent. Furthermore, after a bomb like Double Agent it would be wise to return more towards the style that popularized your game in the first place before branching out in new directions. I'm not asking for EA Games Madden-esque repetition here and not saying that taking franchises in new creative directions is not good, but when you fail so badly take it back to base before you try again.
Also: If you notice game sales going down it probably has a correlation to your games sucking, regardless of the actual effects of piracy. Since the industry has pretty much stopped offering demos often times the only way to try a game is to download it first. If it sucks why would you bother purchasing it? "Better" DRM isn't going to help you on this front, however games that don't suck would. =)
The general market is easily entertained and companies will sell to them as much as possible. Why spend big $$$ to please the /. geek living in his mother's basement when you can pay a college dropout next to nothing to develop a series of pointless little web games that will appeal to a much larger (and less discerning) audience.
This is the same logic used in the film industry, though in all fairness the film industry is at least starting to realize that there are more geeks than previously thought and trying to compensate for it (see also: LOTR, Batman, Watchmen).
I find it disappointing that the game industry has moved from the model where they kept having to innovate to stay one step ahead of the competition and into a realm where they simply churn out the same game over and over without really adding much or even bothering to differentiate their game from the competition. Unfortunately the game industry has figured out that a large portion of the videogame market is easily entertained, just as is the case with film audiences (Transformers 2 anybody?). If they keep stamping Madden 20xx on the cover of a game odds are they'll continue making money, regardless of the actual quality or content.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I've gone from being an avid gamer to barely touching games at all, mainly from lack of interest. There just aren't many good new games coming out.
It's worth noting that pointing the extortion racket out during communications intended to get you removed from said blacklist will result in you never hearing another word from the people at SORBS. Funny thing though: After referring (numerous) complaining customers to SORBS as the source of all their woes I found myself removed from the blacklists in short order. Odd how that works.
We have had issues with users taking our OS CDs/DVDs from our helpdesk either accidentally or intentionally. A few months ago we set out to create custom labels for all our discs to make it quite clear that we didn't want them walking off.
A user walked in a couple weeks after we had fixed her computer and stated that they wanted very much to use their optical drive but she was afraid to take out the disc labeled in large font "DO NOT REMOVE."
My Oregonian insight on the matter is to confirm that Gov. Kulongoski is indeed a stark moron.
Perhaps one of these days we'll actually elect a Governor based on their merits instead of based on the fact that they are the Democratic candidate.
Very good idea! In fact why don't we hand .org to Oregon while we're at it, surely they will give that TLD much better use than the legions of lackluster sites infesting that TLD.
I don't think he is so much claiming that FreeBSD is superior but that it's license is superior and folks may have to cope with the rest in order to escape GPLv3.
:)
Good thing too, I would have had to cry BS if he was really claiming that it's better as an OS.
You must be one of the refugees from Digg while they do yet more work on their site. This is slashdot, there is no bury.
I operate a small hosting business and agree with you 100%, don't buy hosting from someone unless they have physical access to the box and know what they are doing.
After hearing so many sob stories of resold hosting dropping off the face of the planet and customers left adrift I made the move from a VPS and colocated my business with a reputable provider downtown. In addition to the peace of mind it provides me and my customers I've also been free of the the service outages and "oops" moments that were frequent with the VPS provider I had been with previously.
The Voyager probes are 15.5 and 12.5 billion kilometers from the sun and Comcast can connect to them, yet still couldn't get a connection out to my house in relative suburbia until a couple years ago?
I call BS.