Unless you have an absolute compulsion to say something in your medium, without regard to fashion, critics, or a regular meal schedule, art ain't for you. Only if "you got something in you that's gotta come out" will you survive. Clarify your message and ignore the critics. The medium will become valid when (or maybe 20 years after) someone says something important with it. Apparently, no one has yet.
1/4 your normal pay rate for all the time you are required to carry the pager. Response hours from the time you get the page until you leave the building, your normal over-time rate, with weekend, holiday, shift multipliers applied. 30 minute maximum response time requirement also, IIRC, so you can't wander too far from home base if you are on the pager. And 100% sobriety while on call required as well, just in case you *do* have to rebuild that server.
I've never had to carry the pager, but I've had to decide if I wanted particular servers covered 24x7 and to cough up the bucks out of my budget if I did. A *good* thing, IMHO, to force managers to make that decision. It's too easy to spend somebody elses budget and blow off somebody elses ski weekend unless the cost comes home.
Any OS vendor that will sign the NDA gets equal access to advance CPU information. Many open source developers (rightly, IMHO) avoid signing the NDA's because of IP contamination issues. As a devloper, you have to make choices around advance information.
As the one time (and a blessedly *short* time it was) code owner for the offical CPU identification code published in the Intel ap note, all I can say is: It ain't that hard! And CPUID information is public pretty early, before any production parts are shipping.
And of course, the state is making it worse by forcing auto manufacturers to get to some %age of ZEV's soon. "Zero-emmision" being an oxymoron. Your nice GM electric needs to be charged, and those Watts come from somewhere. Figure 60% effecient motor in the car, 75% efficient charging, 65% efficient transmission from generator to your home, 60% efficient generation -- let's see 0.6*0.75*0.65*0.6 = 17% or so percent of the power generated goes into moving your car -- with "zero emmissions" -- so.... that power plant doesn't have emmissions???
Wind turbines environmentally friendly? ROTFL! Assuming you like to eat ground eagle and ground buzzard meat for dinner. Windmills kill birds. Dams kill salmon. Next suggestion?
Well, you might want to rethink that. I hear that the witness protection program has some great freebies, like a rockin' bright yellow rugby shirt personalized with your new name embroidered on the front, and "FBI Witness" on the back. You'd give that up for Tahiti?
1. Once connected at 384K symmetric, life has been sweet (modulo one 4-day outage caused by their double-plus-clueless CLEC, PacBell). It would break my heart to unplug.
2. My employer drove the 2+ month process of getting installed. It was gruesome. Without the IT department of a Fortune 500 employer beating them with clue-sticks every step of the way, I'd be DSL-less. I'd also be 128K... Their initial survey said I could only get 128K in my area, until the above-mentioned IT department with the clue-stick said "look again".
(Re:WTF?! ) Agreed. Waterproofing more useful.
on
Speak To Your Palm
·
· Score: 1
Speaking as a member of the grafted, I could not agree more. The only time I ever have needed my palm and didn't have it is when I get a good idea while in the shower.
...The big guys (Intel, SGI, etc) *loan* you the hardware. I've seen a lot of "loan agreements" get signed as the hardware crosses the shipping docks. So... if you are the beneficiary of a hardware loan, someday you may be asked to ship the ol' doorstop back... maybe... *wink* *wink*
DOS compatibility is at odds with stability and security. If you plug security holes, and tighten the lid on broken/questionable drivers, then you give up some DOS compatibility. Can't have it both ways -- choose your poison.
If you want to keep coding, no problem. Keep up with technonogy. At 40 or 50 you can be a senior individual contributor, and get your share of influence and respect. But not if you are stale, and not if you can't think clearly and state your opinions clearly and crisply. Big equity positions in start-ups go to 40-ish technologists that have their shit together. OTOH, the stale and the feeble-brained will not find much market for 20 year old skills and random, inarticulate thoughts.
Mom was right, you should worry more about yourself and less about what other people think of you.
-dbc, age 43, and all non-stale, sharp thinking, 40 and 50 year old programmers and hardware debugging gunslingers should send me their resume's... I'd like the recruiting bonus:-)
Well, among my several employers, I've been through a couple of startups over the years. One went well for the investors, but I was too junior to make much off of it. The other was as bad as it gets... it was so bad it didn't even make a detectable crater when it went chapter 13. So here goes: 1. The aforementioned crash & burn went ch. 13 because the two key founders had a combined emotional age of 6. Choose the team carefully. The VC's also primarily fund on quality and track record of the team. 2. What is missing from your team? A good marketing guy? No one is more important to success -- including the chief software architect -- so park your geek ego, OK? By the way, most marketing guys are not *good* marketing guys -- get someone that is clearly insightful. If it smells like arm-waving BS, it is. Do you have a manager? You need someone who has actual people management experience for a few years with >16 person teams... this is *not* an area for OJT.. and well meaning but clueless about people management and keeping a shop running will drive good people away... besides burning up your money. 3. Remember that the job of a start-up team is to put scalable processes in place. Almost all companies go through "growing pains". Most can be avoided. The pain is caused by outgrowing the processes that work for small teams. Example: 2 guys whacking code can survive without a defect tracking system. 20 can not. Every process needs to be examined for scalability.. you will miss some, and those will be the walls you hit. 4. When something begins to smell a little like a mistake... ruthlessly surface the issue and squash the mistake immediatly. Bad hire? Throw the bum out NOW. Bad choice of tool? ditto. Chapter 13, Inc. would have done far better if the board had been *less* patient with the clowns at the controls. Small companies can take too many self-inflicted wounds. 5. You *do* need a business plan. Revise it regularly. It's for *you*, not the VC's. Keeps you focused on what matters. 6. Pinch pennies, but in the right places. It's pretty simple, the less money you burn, the more of the company you keep for yourself. Cheap used furniture or even plywood holds up a monitor as well as anything else. Use your money to buy tools that make your coders squirt ascii like a firehose and squash bugs in dozens. 7. There happens to be way more money in the hands of VC's right now than at any time in recent decades. WAY more. They are funding stupid deals that will crash and burn. They are funding big deals because little $2M dribbles doesn't invest it fast enough. Your challenge will be getting noticed, because they are too busy pushing money into the hands of people they already know... people that have made them money in the past. So.. back to #2, do you have somebody on your team that knows how to raise money from VC's? Find one.
And best of luck. A start up will be be best, worst, most educational, most tiring E-ticket ride you can find. Whether you make a zillion or if you crash and burn.
There is a directory called the "Martindale-Hubble" (sp?) that lists law firms large and small in the US. If a lawyer needs to sue someone (or defend a suit) in a state where they are not licensed to practice, this is how they find a someone with a ticket. If he's real, he's in there. So find someone that has one of these and look him up (or not...)
Slashdot Mirror
-dbc
... building deparment wants for permit and inspection fees?
Unless you have an absolute compulsion to say something in your medium, without regard to fashion, critics, or a regular meal schedule, art ain't for you. Only if "you got something in you that's gotta come out" will you survive. Clarify your message and ignore the critics. The medium will become valid when (or maybe 20 years after) someone says something important with it. Apparently, no one has yet.
... at this large tech company is:
1/4 your normal pay rate for all the time you are required to carry the pager. Response hours from the time you get the page until you leave the building, your normal over-time rate, with weekend, holiday, shift multipliers applied. 30 minute maximum response time requirement also, IIRC, so you can't wander too far from home base if you are on the pager. And 100% sobriety while on call required as well, just in case you *do* have to rebuild that server.
I've never had to carry the pager, but I've had to decide if I wanted particular servers covered 24x7 and to cough up the bucks out of my budget if I did. A *good* thing, IMHO, to force managers to make that decision. It's too easy to spend somebody elses budget and blow off somebody elses ski weekend unless the cost comes home.
Any OS vendor that will sign the NDA gets equal access to advance CPU information. Many open source developers (rightly, IMHO) avoid signing the NDA's because of IP contamination issues. As a devloper, you have to make choices around advance information.
As the one time (and a blessedly *short* time it was) code owner for the offical CPU identification code published in the Intel ap note, all I can say is: It ain't that hard! And CPUID information is public pretty early, before any production parts are shipping.
Disclaimer: Not speaking for Intel, etc, etc.
And of course, the state is making it worse by forcing auto manufacturers to get to some %age of ZEV's soon. "Zero-emmision" being an oxymoron. Your nice GM electric needs to be charged, and those Watts come from somewhere. Figure 60% effecient motor in the car, 75% efficient charging, 65% efficient transmission from generator to your home, 60% efficient generation -- let's see 0.6*0.75*0.65*0.6 = 17% or so percent of the power generated goes into moving your car -- with "zero emmissions" -- so.... that power plant doesn't have emmissions???
Wind turbines environmentally friendly? ROTFL! Assuming you like to eat ground eagle and ground buzzard meat for dinner. Windmills kill birds. Dams kill salmon. Next suggestion?
who needs this crap? just use shares...
Well, you might want to rethink that. I hear that the witness protection program has some great freebies, like a rockin' bright yellow rugby shirt personalized with your new name embroidered on the front, and "FBI Witness" on the back. You'd give that up for Tahiti?
1. Once connected at 384K symmetric, life has been sweet (modulo one 4-day outage caused by their double-plus-clueless CLEC, PacBell). It would break my heart to unplug.
2. My employer drove the 2+ month process of getting installed. It was gruesome. Without the IT department of a Fortune 500 employer beating them with clue-sticks every step of the way, I'd be DSL-less. I'd also be 128K... Their initial survey said I could only get 128K in my area, until the above-mentioned IT department with the clue-stick said "look again".
Speaking as a member of the grafted, I could not agree more. The only time I ever have needed my palm and didn't have it is when I get a good idea while in the shower.
...The big guys (Intel, SGI, etc) *loan* you the hardware. I've seen a lot of "loan agreements" get signed as the hardware crosses the shipping docks. So... if you are the beneficiary of a hardware loan, someday you may be asked to ship the ol' doorstop back... maybe... *wink* *wink*
DOS compatibility is at odds with stability and security. If you plug security holes, and tighten the lid on broken/questionable drivers, then you give up some DOS compatibility. Can't have it both ways -- choose your poison.
..disguised as a slashdot headline! Ingenious!
Back on topic: Eating ones own dogfood is worthy of respect. Chow down, boys and girls.
If you want to keep coding, no problem. Keep up with technonogy. At 40 or 50 you can be a senior individual contributor, and get your share of influence and respect. But not if you are stale, and not if you can't think clearly and state your opinions clearly and crisply. Big equity positions in start-ups go to 40-ish technologists that have their shit together. OTOH, the stale and the feeble-brained will not find much market for 20 year old skills and random, inarticulate thoughts.
:-)
Mom was right, you should worry more about yourself and less about what other people think of you.
-dbc, age 43, and all non-stale, sharp thinking, 40 and 50 year old programmers and hardware debugging gunslingers should send me their resume's... I'd like the recruiting bonus
n6nz, almost off topic
Well, among my several employers, I've been through a couple of startups over the years. One went well for the investors, but I was too junior to make much off of it. The other was as bad as it gets... it was so bad it didn't even make a detectable crater when it went chapter 13. So here goes:
1. The aforementioned crash & burn went ch. 13 because the two key founders had a combined emotional age of 6. Choose the team carefully. The VC's also primarily fund on quality and track record of the team.
2. What is missing from your team? A good marketing guy? No one is more important to success -- including the chief software architect -- so park your geek ego, OK? By the way, most marketing guys are not *good* marketing guys -- get someone that is clearly insightful. If it smells like arm-waving BS, it is. Do you have a manager? You need someone who has actual people management experience for a few years with >16 person teams... this is *not* an area for OJT.. and well meaning but clueless about people management and keeping a shop running will drive good people away... besides burning up your money.
3. Remember that the job of a start-up team is to put scalable processes in place. Almost all companies go through "growing pains". Most can be avoided. The pain is caused by outgrowing the processes that work for small teams. Example: 2 guys whacking code can survive without a defect tracking system. 20 can not. Every process needs to be examined for scalability.. you will miss some, and those will be the walls you hit.
4. When something begins to smell a little like a mistake... ruthlessly surface the issue and squash the mistake immediatly. Bad hire? Throw the bum out NOW. Bad choice of tool? ditto. Chapter 13, Inc. would have done far better if the board had been *less* patient with the clowns at the controls. Small companies can take too many self-inflicted wounds.
5. You *do* need a business plan. Revise it regularly. It's for *you*, not the VC's. Keeps you focused on what matters.
6. Pinch pennies, but in the right places. It's pretty simple, the less money you burn, the more of the company you keep for yourself. Cheap used furniture or even plywood holds up a monitor as well as anything else. Use your money to buy tools that make your coders squirt ascii like a firehose and squash bugs in dozens.
7. There happens to be way more money in the hands of VC's right now than at any time in recent decades. WAY more. They are funding stupid deals that will crash and burn. They are funding big deals because little $2M dribbles doesn't invest it fast enough. Your challenge will be getting noticed, because they are too busy pushing money into the hands of people they already know... people that have made them money in the past. So.. back to #2, do you have somebody on your team that knows how to raise money from VC's? Find one.
And best of luck. A start up will be be best, worst, most educational, most tiring E-ticket ride you can find. Whether you make a zillion or if you crash and burn.
There is a directory called the "Martindale-Hubble" (sp?) that lists law firms large and small in the US. If a lawyer needs to sue someone (or defend a suit) in a state where they are not licensed to practice, this is how they find a someone with a ticket. If he's real, he's in there. So find someone that has one of these and look him up (or not...)
A SlashDot login in the wrong hands is.... um... OK, I guess *that's* harmless :-)