by Dave Ramsey...or a similar book about how to create a budget, how to stick to it, and some common sense answers about debt, credit, loans, and investing (I don't really care if you pick Ramsey's book, or a different one on the same subject, but his is very straight-forward, and easy to understand the key points). I'm sure it's not a popular subject with most of the Slashdot crowd, but the OP did say books "everyone should read". Everyone really doesn't need to read the Hobbit, but everyone should know how to manage their money: it's an essential life skill in 1st world countries.
I used to work for a company that made technology for railroads. Some of the engineers, that didn't mind the travel, spent a lot of time flying out to customer field sites to do all sorts of various work that didn't involve standing at a desk. Collecting field data, climbing into locomotives to install new software or hardware, giving demos, or just going out into the field to test new ideas. Yes, there was certainly a fair share of sitting down involved, but that was sometimes balanced out by spending an hour or two walking around a rail yard or similar activity.
You have an IP, you have a vague location, and you have an e-mail address that the perp is likely reading. If you can't get law enforcement to do anything about it, and all else fails, they don't have to know that. Send an e-mail telling them that the laptop they are using is stolen property, you have the IP address, which can be used to track their exact location, then give them the location info that you have been able to track. Tell them that you are giving them one chance to respond personally and arrange for return of the stolen property before you contact the authorities to have them arrested. Remind them of the severe criminal penalties for such a theft, and you can even throw in some digital crime mumbo-jumbo (which may or may not actually be prosecutable), to trump up the charges to felony.
The ability to communicate with the possible thief (or eventual owner) is a powerful thing, so if you can't find any other route, don't waste that chance. If it's already been resold, then the new owner may be more than willing to negotiate a return. I had my laptop stolen early last year, and after endlessly calling pawn shops, scouring Craigslist and Ebay for months, we finally gave up. I was perfectly willing to take matters in to my own hands if I saw it turn up on ebay or craigslist, knowing full well that the local Police as much as admitted there was little they could do about it.
If you work yourself into an embedded systems type career, you can try your hand at field support. As an example, in my line of work (Railroad/Transportation industry), the field is wide open for developers to work on embedded software for locomotives, rail yard switching software, etc. We typically require about 25% of your time as travel time doing field support. You could, I'm sure, find similar embedded field support roles in the medical industry, media (TV/radio), and many other areas. There are a lot of applications for software to run what's "inside the box". For someone who doesn't mind travel, this can be the best-of-both-worlds, as you get to get your "hands on" in the field troubleshooting, and you get to spend time in the lab or at the desk part of the time as well.
The tomorrow of the 1970s! My state has had machines like this since I was a toddler. Just to be clear, a large number of Florida counties already have a "fill in the oval" scan-reader type system. I should know, I live in such a Florida county. I have been dutifully filling in the ovals every November for years and years now in my home county. The article was only talking about 15 counties that exclusively use the touch-screen type machines.
To address another poster's point, yes Florida does seem to address the mis-marked oval ballot issue, at least in my experience. I have personally witnessed the lady in front of me in line feed her ballot in the machine, only to have the machine spit it back out with an error about a mismarked ballot. Then a poll worker pointed her to a "special" line to assist her.
Stuff I have gathered to help in my profession, software engineering including C++ coding, as well as integration type activities including many types of scripting, over the last 15 years of my career:
The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup - If you want a language reference, go straight to the source!
STL Tutorial and Reference Guide, Second Edition by Musser, Derge, and Saini - For get-your-hands-dirty C++ work
Effective STL by Scott Meyers
Unix Power Tools by Powers, Peek, O'Reilly & Loukides - Great reference for Unix tools, Unix command line, shell scripting.
Perl in a Nutshell by Patwardhan, Siever & Spainhour - Good Perl reference, including CGI stuff.
Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk by Ken Jones, Jeffrey Hobbs, Brent B. Welch - Great Tcl reference or for learning Tcl (a good language for prototyping GUIs, writing quick GUI tools, or tying other tools together).
The O'Reilly & Associates Definitive Guides to the X Window System - Getting out-of-date by today's standards, but a great references to an early "Object Oriented" style GUI system.
OSF/Motif Style Guide from the Open Software Foundation - also out-of-date, but still has great relevant lessons on keeping your UI design consistent, usable, and standardized.
And of course, I reccomend for any Software Engineer, some good references for your particular domain in which you work, so you know how to apply the domain knowledge to your software application. For me that would be, e.g.:
The Railroad, What It Is, What It Does by Armstrong - Great overview of the railroad industry, where I am currently employed
I'd be lucky to get 8.4c/kwh! Here in Florida, I'm paying over 10c/kwh, and the cost per kwh goes UP, not DOWN when I use over 1000kwh (this includes a base rate per kwh plus a "fuel charge"). Crimeny! I'd love to know where you live to get 2-3c per kwh!
Everyone's noticed the recent flood of image spam...
I haven't. I can't even remember the last spam message I've seen, period--not even in my throwaway accounts.
I can second that. I tell my E-mail program not to download images in E-mail unless I click the button to fetch them. It's just a mess of trouble with spam and tracking images, and wasted bandwidth otherwise. Is it just me? Am I the only one using those handy features of modern E-mail programs? Even if you get tons of spam past your filters, you shouldn't even be "seeing" the image spam if you don't ask for the images.
Just teaching engineers that writing something is much better than writing nothing at all is a great leap forward. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind here is comments in computer code, but of course there are other common situations like within design documentation where sometimes engineers tend to be too brief or concise, or not say anything at all where even something poorly worded could save a lot of time. I don't know how many undocumented functions I've had to try to maintain where just a simple one sentence "what is this function for" would have helped me immensely.
And of course the other important thing is to teach engineers to proofread what they read. For some reason, geeks are notorious for, as you say "horrifying grammar", but you should also just going back over what you've written once, to make sure you've gotten your thoughts properly in order. Even in e-mails. You'd hate to send an E-mail off to your boss about an important project and have him not really understand what you are talking about because you didn't have time to re-read what you wrote to make sure you said what you thought you said.
My company has developed a large software project on a server cluster for the backend. Our server-side architecture is (in theory) scalable as large as we want to go. We use BEA Tuxedo to assign different applications to different servers, and all the databases are available via a SAN. The Unix servers use are currently configured with 4 to 8 CPUs each, and 8 to 16 GB memory. The server cluster is currently configured between 2 and 10 servers for our current deployments, though we could scale larger simply by rearranging the tuxedo configuration files if we needed to.
Now, some server-side apps in our system are architected to scale very well, and some we have had to spend the last few months tweaking the code as we grow with our current customer's deployment. In general though, our system tends towards lots of specific apps running simultaneously to handle individual tasks, rather than a small number of large, monolithic apps. I think it is very much making sure you have large system scalability in mind from the beginning, and not starting small and then realizing "Oh no! We never realized we'd have to handle THIS much traffic!" Our project is a perfect example of learning that lesson over and over as we've had to tweak or rewrite pieces of it as we add more and more clients to our customers' deployment. It can be done, but depending on how you've written your apps, it may not be easy.
Wow. How did me asking a question denote this type of response? Good to know Slashdot is the place for attacking more than helping... never did I say we were pc gurus, but it's good to know this is the place to go for support without ridicule.
Then the reply...
"denote" That word.... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Is it just me, or am I the only one who found it hillariously funny that the very next response to bradyj's rightful slam on the Slashdot community's general tendancy to (at least many times) pick apart every flaw, shortcoming, or ignorance of the original poster, was the very type of response he was talking about?
I can't help but frown with chagrin when the OP originally asks for a non-Windows based solution to his problem, and from scanning the top-moderated responses, all the best answers are still Windows-based solutions. The best solutions involve adding additional hardware (e.g.: firewall router) to protect the travesty of a worm/virus nest that is the Windows operating system.
I searched for a similar solution last year when I went on vacation to set up a webcam in my home to "keep an eye on things" remotely, but gave up when I couldn't find something I could easily host via my Mac or a Linux partition on one of my PCs. Looks like the state of video servers on Linux/Mac has not advanced much since that time.
Seems to me the Linux market is ripe for remotely managed-type low end PC applications for just this kind of thing, with a great advantage over Windows-based solutions.
It's going to take more than a rough-around-the-edges music player to get me to switch to Apple hardware. Specifically, it would take about a $500-$1000 price drop as well as more software companies releasing games with support for Mac OS X (Battlefield 2 anyone?)
Mac mini: $499
eMac: $799
iBook: $999
Wow! You want Apple to pay you for buying their computers! That would be awesome!
Have been using Firefox 1.0 as my sole browser on 98SE and it runs beautifully. On my OS X 10.1.5 iBook via 802.11b, however, the Bookmark menu, of all things, consistently causes it to crash as soon as I click it.
I haven't had time to go check the Mozilla forums so far, only to post it on Slashdot! =D
I can honestly say that my Mom was for the most part happy with her life and even lived a relatively normal life. My Mom was diagnosed well before I was born and before my father had even married her, so I grew up with a Schitzoid mother. Suprisingly, I didn't even learn until my early 20's exactly what was wrong with her, though I had suspected something was a bit off with my mom that time in high school she took off with no notice and left us stranded at school.
The blend of drugs that the doctors had my Mom on did a wonderful job of keeping her stable and able to lead a "normal" life. Naturally (as I learned later) her stability and demeanor seemed to improve as the years passed and the doctor adjusted her dosages or tried out a new medication. So really, between the medication and my Father sort of "covering" for her, I had a great family life growing up, and I would say there is great hope in this day and age for a Schitzophrenic and their loved ones.
The hardest part had to be taking the different drugs on the proper schedule, apparently her drugs were carefully balanced to have different drugs taken at different times of the day. Really the only times we had any issues was when maybe she would miss a dosage or get off, then the "Paranoid" part of her condition would kick in first, and she'd stop taking her meds all together because she became paranoid of the meds ("Those doctors!! I don't trust them!!"). It was a downhill snowball effect after that. Fortunately, for the most part, when she had an "episode" (off her meds) she'd usually get in her car and drive to her sister's house (about a 2-3 hour drive away)--which is in the town where she grew up. Then her sister would call us and let us know where she was and that everything was ok. She'd be home and stabilized soon enough. Once we got a call from the Sherriff's Office that they had our Mom and that she had entered a perfect stranger's house thinking it was her Doctor's office. These type things where she got off her meds and would just "disappear" would only happen every few years or so.
I am blessed that the last 8-10 years of my Mom's life were pretty-much problem free. I hope and pray that your family wil be as fortunate as ours was (I know that every case is different). And I can honestly say, having lived with my Mom for 30+ years with this condition, your Sister has a good chance to lead a relatively normal life, albeit with some added medication.
First off, location is everything. I am not sure what area you are in, but it is true that salaries can vary widely from region to region (and naturally country to country!)
My first job out of college in 1989 paid about $25k a year as a software engineer. That was near the bottom of the barrel for salaries in my area at that time for a software engineer, but still a respectable living (I coulda probably gotten another $5k-10k in my area for a new hire).
But it was a fabulous job! I worked a mutli-million dollar software development project from start to finish at Kennedy Space Center--invaluable experience and great fun. It may forever remain the fondest memory in my working career--working at KSC, watching shuttles launch where I was close enough to feel the air vibrate as they thundered into the sky, during the peak of the post-Challenger era. Telling all my friends I was a Rocket Scientist (TM).
I've since moved on, but I'm still a firm believer that if you don't enjoy what you are doing, no salary is enough. I'm married with kids now, and you couldn't pay me enough to work 60-70 hours a week instead of spending that time with my family.
Look for the job you're going to enjoy, something you believe in, it will add years to your life, instead of take them away!
Slashdot Mirror
Now all I need is an app to find where I left my phone! ....has anyone seen it?
by Dave Ramsey...or a similar book about how to create a budget, how to stick to it, and some common sense answers about debt, credit, loans, and investing (I don't really care if you pick Ramsey's book, or a different one on the same subject, but his is very straight-forward, and easy to understand the key points). I'm sure it's not a popular subject with most of the Slashdot crowd, but the OP did say books "everyone should read". Everyone really doesn't need to read the Hobbit, but everyone should know how to manage their money: it's an essential life skill in 1st world countries.
I used to work for a company that made technology for railroads. Some of the engineers, that didn't mind the travel, spent a lot of time flying out to customer field sites to do all sorts of various work that didn't involve standing at a desk. Collecting field data, climbing into locomotives to install new software or hardware, giving demos, or just going out into the field to test new ideas. Yes, there was certainly a fair share of sitting down involved, but that was sometimes balanced out by spending an hour or two walking around a rail yard or similar activity.
You have an IP, you have a vague location, and you have an e-mail address that the perp is likely reading. If you can't get law enforcement to do anything about it, and all else fails, they don't have to know that. Send an e-mail telling them that the laptop they are using is stolen property, you have the IP address, which can be used to track their exact location, then give them the location info that you have been able to track. Tell them that you are giving them one chance to respond personally and arrange for return of the stolen property before you contact the authorities to have them arrested. Remind them of the severe criminal penalties for such a theft, and you can even throw in some digital crime mumbo-jumbo (which may or may not actually be prosecutable), to trump up the charges to felony.
The ability to communicate with the possible thief (or eventual owner) is a powerful thing, so if you can't find any other route, don't waste that chance. If it's already been resold, then the new owner may be more than willing to negotiate a return. I had my laptop stolen early last year, and after endlessly calling pawn shops, scouring Craigslist and Ebay for months, we finally gave up. I was perfectly willing to take matters in to my own hands if I saw it turn up on ebay or craigslist, knowing full well that the local Police as much as admitted there was little they could do about it.
If you work yourself into an embedded systems type career, you can try your hand at field support. As an example, in my line of work (Railroad/Transportation industry), the field is wide open for developers to work on embedded software for locomotives, rail yard switching software, etc. We typically require about 25% of your time as travel time doing field support. You could, I'm sure, find similar embedded field support roles in the medical industry, media (TV/radio), and many other areas. There are a lot of applications for software to run what's "inside the box". For someone who doesn't mind travel, this can be the best-of-both-worlds, as you get to get your "hands on" in the field troubleshooting, and you get to spend time in the lab or at the desk part of the time as well.
To address another poster's point, yes Florida does seem to address the mis-marked oval ballot issue, at least in my experience. I have personally witnessed the lady in front of me in line feed her ballot in the machine, only to have the machine spit it back out with an error about a mismarked ballot. Then a poll worker pointed her to a "special" line to assist her.
And of course, I reccomend for any Software Engineer, some good references for your particular domain in which you work, so you know how to apply the domain knowledge to your software application. For me that would be, e.g.:
I'd be lucky to get 8.4c/kwh! Here in Florida, I'm paying over 10c/kwh, and the cost per kwh goes UP, not DOWN when I use over 1000kwh (this includes a base rate per kwh plus a "fuel charge"). Crimeny! I'd love to know where you live to get 2-3c per kwh!
Q: How many drummers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None! They have machines to do that now!
Q: What is the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?
A: A drum machine can keep a steady beat and won't steal your girlfriend!
Q: What do you call the girl that's always hanging on the drummer's arm?
A: A tattoo.
Q: Why do bands have bass players?
A: To translate for the drummer.
Q: What did the drummer get on his IQ test?
A: Drool.
Did you hear about the bass player who locked his keys in the car?
He had to break a window to get the drummer out!
I can second that. I tell my E-mail program not to download images in E-mail unless I click the button to fetch them. It's just a mess of trouble with spam and tracking images, and wasted bandwidth otherwise. Is it just me? Am I the only one using those handy features of modern E-mail programs? Even if you get tons of spam past your filters, you shouldn't even be "seeing" the image spam if you don't ask for the images.
Just teaching engineers that writing something is much better than writing nothing at all is a great leap forward. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind here is comments in computer code, but of course there are other common situations like within design documentation where sometimes engineers tend to be too brief or concise, or not say anything at all where even something poorly worded could save a lot of time. I don't know how many undocumented functions I've had to try to maintain where just a simple one sentence "what is this function for" would have helped me immensely.
And of course the other important thing is to teach engineers to proofread what they read. For some reason, geeks are notorious for, as you say "horrifying grammar", but you should also just going back over what you've written once, to make sure you've gotten your thoughts properly in order. Even in e-mails. You'd hate to send an E-mail off to your boss about an important project and have him not really understand what you are talking about because you didn't have time to re-read what you wrote to make sure you said what you thought you said.
My company has developed a large software project on a server cluster for the backend. Our server-side architecture is (in theory) scalable as large as we want to go. We use BEA Tuxedo to assign different applications to different servers, and all the databases are available via a SAN. The Unix servers use are currently configured with 4 to 8 CPUs each, and 8 to 16 GB memory. The server cluster is currently configured between 2 and 10 servers for our current deployments, though we could scale larger simply by rearranging the tuxedo configuration files if we needed to.
Now, some server-side apps in our system are architected to scale very well, and some we have had to spend the last few months tweaking the code as we grow with our current customer's deployment. In general though, our system tends towards lots of specific apps running simultaneously to handle individual tasks, rather than a small number of large, monolithic apps. I think it is very much making sure you have large system scalability in mind from the beginning, and not starting small and then realizing "Oh no! We never realized we'd have to handle THIS much traffic!" Our project is a perfect example of learning that lesson over and over as we've had to tweak or rewrite pieces of it as we add more and more clients to our customers' deployment. It can be done, but depending on how you've written your apps, it may not be easy.
Wow. How did me asking a question denote this type of response? Good to know Slashdot is the place for attacking more than helping... never did I say we were pc gurus, but it's good to know this is the place to go for support without ridicule.
Then the reply...
"denote"
That word.... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Is it just me, or am I the only one who found it hillariously funny that the very next response to bradyj's rightful slam on the Slashdot community's general tendancy to (at least many times) pick apart every flaw, shortcoming, or ignorance of the original poster, was the very type of response he was talking about?
I can't help but frown with chagrin when the OP originally asks for a non-Windows based solution to his problem, and from scanning the top-moderated responses, all the best answers are still Windows-based solutions. The best solutions involve adding additional hardware (e.g.: firewall router) to protect the travesty of a worm/virus nest that is the Windows operating system.
I searched for a similar solution last year when I went on vacation to set up a webcam in my home to "keep an eye on things" remotely, but gave up when I couldn't find something I could easily host via my Mac or a Linux partition on one of my PCs. Looks like the state of video servers on Linux/Mac has not advanced much since that time.
Seems to me the Linux market is ripe for remotely managed-type low end PC applications for just this kind of thing, with a great advantage over Windows-based solutions.
eMac: $799
iBook: $999
Wow! You want Apple to pay you for buying their computers! That would be awesome!
Have been using Firefox 1.0 as my sole browser on 98SE and it runs beautifully. On my OS X 10.1.5 iBook via 802.11b, however, the Bookmark menu, of all things, consistently causes it to crash as soon as I click it.
I haven't had time to go check the Mozilla forums so far, only to post it on Slashdot! =D
I can honestly say that my Mom was for the most part happy with her life and even lived a relatively normal life. My Mom was diagnosed well before I was born and before my father had even married her, so I grew up with a Schitzoid mother. Suprisingly, I didn't even learn until my early 20's exactly what was wrong with her, though I had suspected something was a bit off with my mom that time in high school she took off with no notice and left us stranded at school.
The blend of drugs that the doctors had my Mom on did a wonderful job of keeping her stable and able to lead a "normal" life. Naturally (as I learned later) her stability and demeanor seemed to improve as the years passed and the doctor adjusted her dosages or tried out a new medication. So really, between the medication and my Father sort of "covering" for her, I had a great family life growing up, and I would say there is great hope in this day and age for a Schitzophrenic and their loved ones.
The hardest part had to be taking the different drugs on the proper schedule, apparently her drugs were carefully balanced to have different drugs taken at different times of the day. Really the only times we had any issues was when maybe she would miss a dosage or get off, then the "Paranoid" part of her condition would kick in first, and she'd stop taking her meds all together because she became paranoid of the meds ("Those doctors!! I don't trust them!!"). It was a downhill snowball effect after that. Fortunately, for the most part, when she had an "episode" (off her meds) she'd usually get in her car and drive to her sister's house (about a 2-3 hour drive away)--which is in the town where she grew up. Then her sister would call us and let us know where she was and that everything was ok. She'd be home and stabilized soon enough. Once we got a call from the Sherriff's Office that they had our Mom and that she had entered a perfect stranger's house thinking it was her Doctor's office. These type things where she got off her meds and would just "disappear" would only happen every few years or so.
I am blessed that the last 8-10 years of my Mom's life were pretty-much problem free. I hope and pray that your family wil be as fortunate as ours was (I know that every case is different). And I can honestly say, having lived with my Mom for 30+ years with this condition, your Sister has a good chance to lead a relatively normal life, albeit with some added medication.
First off, location is everything. I am not sure what area you are in, but it is true that salaries can vary widely from region to region (and naturally country to country!)
My first job out of college in 1989 paid about $25k a year as a software engineer. That was near the bottom of the barrel for salaries in my area at that time for a software engineer, but still a respectable living (I coulda probably gotten another $5k-10k in my area for a new hire).
But it was a fabulous job! I worked a mutli-million dollar software development project from start to finish at Kennedy Space Center--invaluable experience and great fun. It may forever remain the fondest memory in my working career--working at KSC, watching shuttles launch where I was close enough to feel the air vibrate as they thundered into the sky, during the peak of the post-Challenger era. Telling all my friends I was a Rocket Scientist (TM).
I've since moved on, but I'm still a firm believer that if you don't enjoy what you are doing, no salary is enough. I'm married with kids now, and you couldn't pay me enough to work 60-70 hours a week instead of spending that time with my family.
Look for the job you're going to enjoy, something you believe in, it will add years to your life, instead of take them away!