Just a data point: I graduated college with a BSEE degree in fall 1988 and started working pretty much the first of the year in 1989. My starting salary working in the Chicago area was $32k. Using the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator that works out to about $47k in 2003 dollars.
At the time $32k was considered slightly above average for starting pay for an engineer. On the other hand, engineers were in higher demand then. These days I'd think $40k would be about average.
According to this Salary Wizard the US national average pay for a "Software Engineer I" is $52,364. Take that however you want. It sounds pretty high to me.
Your calculation should include a lot of insurance money to get to the same level a canadian gets from just his taxes.
Right. Looking at my pay for 2003, 19% went to taxes (federal and state) and 13% went to my co-payment of medical benefits. Added together that's a 32% hit taken out of my gross pay.
So US taxes may be lower than Canadian but net take-home pay is roughly the same percentage.
Another nice tool (Windows only, sorry) is Total Recorder from High Criteria. It installs an audio driver shim and can record audio from any source. Essentially, if you can hear it on your PC's speakers, you can record it. I use it for time-shifting and for converting RealAudio and other streams into MP3 for my portable player.
The whole basis of the GPS cell phone data is in the interest of public safety. To assist you when you need it most.
While I agree with most of your post, I have to disagree with this line. That is the promoted use of it, and is quite a good use. However, there's a not-so-well hidden agenda of advertising. When I got my new phone, Verizon was specifically saying that they have plans to use the system to provide "location-based services". That is, based on your location they will send advertisements and instant coupons for nearby businesses.
"John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."
Emergency services are also provided, as a way to convince people we need this. You want to be safe don't you? Fortunately, my phone (and many other models, I'm sure) give me the option to transmit the aGPS data with every call or just with calls to 911. This is something I can live with. The service is there when I have a real emergency, but (unless the phone is lying to me) that information isn't available to advertisers.
Someone in another thread said that the location system doesn't really use GPS. That's not quite true. The cellphone "Assisted GPS" service does use the GPS satellite system, but doesn't need a full GPS receiver in the phone itself. It also uses data from the tower. The IEEE magazine "Computer" had a good summary of the technology. A PDF of the article is at http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~postPC/docs/Geolocation_ assistedGPS.pdf
I finally just ripped the ISO with Alcohol and mounted that as a virtual drive. Works fine now.
I do this with every game I buy. I started doing it with my kids' games, when I got tired of them scratching the fscking CDs all the time. Rip 'em and leave the CDs on a shelf, out of reach. Worked like a charm. Then I found just how freakin' convenient it was for my own stuff. A single click mounts the appropriate CD and fires up the app. I bought a 120G drive for my file server just to store ISOs on. Now I have a box full of pristine only-used-once CDs and a server full of ISOs. Life is good.
It's also useful for rapid prototyping of ideas; it only takes a few minutes to explore a concept (if you're any good at JavaScript programming). But I can't imagine many people actually shipping HTAs.
Agreed, on both counts. Although I've had to fight tooth and nail to keep my management from shipping an HTA I wrote as a demo for the marketing department. "It works. Why not ship it?" Arrrrrrgghhhh!
I find HTAs very handy. I can wrap one of those around a Perl script and have an instant GUI. I don't know VB, and have only passing familiarity with JavaScript. But I do know HTML, and can slap together an HTML form in no time. Works like a charm for those moments when a CLI just doesn't cut it. It's a way this embedded hacker can whip up something that looks nice to impress the front office.
Now, should the technique be patented? Hardly! I thought it was pretty obvious. I only stumbled across HTA after I'd come up with something similar myself, and was surprised to find official support for it in Windows.
Despite running in a web browser, HTAs have nothing to do with the web. They just coincidentally use the same markup language to implement the GUI for a local app.
I just wish I could use the W3 DOM instead of Microsoft's. *sigh*
TA is definitely my all-time favorite RTS. It had great depth of gameplay; there was no one killer strategy. TA has tons of possible strategies and counter-strategies. Intelligence-gathering is key -- you need to know what your opponents are up to so you can counter them.
The game itself had a ton of balancing options, too. Prior to starting you could allow or disallow individual unit types. This could handicap a good player or just give the game a little more variation. Turn off the Advanced Aircraft plants, for example, if you want a grunt war.
The control scheme was great. You could queue orders for any unit, including buildings. You could assign buildings to control groups, so any new units produced there were automatically assigned to a group. I always assign my main production buildings to groups, and give them a perimeter patrol path that emerging units will follow. Then queue up a bunch of units and go off to focus on something else, content that the units will be built and not just stand around looking like a big target.
UberHack was a great mod for the game, too. It added a lot of new features to the game. Best. Mod. Ever. TA with Uberhack became a lunch-hour favorite for better than a year where I was working at the time.
I slogged through FOTR and still put it down before getting to the end. I found it to be the driest, most boring read I'd ever struggled with.
Ah, that's only because you've never read TTT. Now, that is certainly the driest, most boring read imaginable. Never could make it through that one, myself.
In the workplace, someone can sue (and win) over a one-time offense. Many employers are taking a zero-tolerance policy about it, meaning that if someone even suggests to the human resources department that they've been offended, the offender is out on his ass without a hearing.
And, since most workers are "at-will" employees, there's nothing that can be done. The company can fire them whenever, for whatever, and the employee has no recourse unless he can show that the company was acting in a discriminatory fashion against him. Oh, and if you're a white male of European descent, you can't be discriminated against.
Been there, got fired for that. In my case the offense was racial instead of sexual. I meant no offense, and would certainly have apologized had I been given a chance. Nope. Zero tolerance, simply because they were afraid the offended person might sue. I never found out who I offended, never got a chance to apologize, and was told by two different workers-rights lawyers that the only thing I could do was to get my resume together.
You need a hefty pipe that has been welded shut on one end and a hefty dose of insanity. Barrel-testing is an intricate form of engineering and if that thing were to fragment the shrapnel would sever your torso as if it were paper.
My friends and I get together once a year and do this sort of thing. I would highly recommend burying the mortar tube! Catastrophic failure of the tube is no fun if shrapnel perforates the onlookers. We tend to get about a 17-second flight time on bowling balls, and have indeed had at least one tube failure.
We also tend to get at least one visit each year from the local sheriff. They're cool with it (and like to watch!) as long as we stop the booms by nightfall. The neighbors, 3 miles away, tend to complain.
Oh, and 400 pounds of burning thermite is a truly beautiful sight...
Re:Used to do that for a living
on
How Do You Punch In?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Far as I can tell, no one really uses these numbers they just require everyone to fill out their timesheets. It's stupid really... It's not used for payroll. I figure only 5% of the IT workforce actually logs useful data, the rest is worthless. For example, I've logged 40 hours a week for months for nothing special.
I'm an engineer, and have worked in two shops which used time sheets for project tracking. The first one (a little place where the Dilbert factory approached unity) had about a gazillion categories in which to log time, with sub-categories and sub-sub-categories galore. Most people ended up putting in "40 hours misc" every week. The really conscientious ones might have actually broken that down by project. The numbers, of course, became gospel for estimation of future projects.
The second place had a bit better idea how a tracking system should be run, but a piss-poor implementation. The hours had to be manually logged into their "timeclock" program, which was slow and buggy. Later they went to an web-browser client that was even worse, taking 30-60 seconds just to move from one field to the next! The engineers actually rebelled against it, refusing to enter any times at all. And guess what? Turns out nobody really noticed...
BTW, at the first place I decided to track my own hours the right way. I found a program that let me define my own categories. Click a category and time automatically started accumulating until you clicked something else. (I think it was called 'timex' or 'xtime', circa 1990.) I set up a category for each of my projects, without all the extraneous crap the regular program had. I also set up a few categories for different sorts of interruptions. I used this program pretty religiously for about a year, and was kind of disturbed to find that only about 30% of my time was going into actual budgeted projects. Everything else was off-topic. I haven't tracked time as closely anywhere else, but subjectively it seems that this 30% figure is pretty universal.
combine that with a flash disk or some other form of solid state store and a transmeta or via c3 cpu and you've removed the three biggest power draws on a laptop.
You do realize that all of these technologies do require power when the screen changes, right? So if you're doing video you're consuming power. This may be one reason it's called "digital paper", not "low-power video". And, as such, the chief applications will be replacing static paper displays with mostly-static digital paper displays.
But it's not because the GNU flavor does not implement the de-facto standard DEC extensions to the language that give it dynamic memory allocation, pointers, and data structures. Without these Fortran 77 is indeed barbaric, but with them it is quite pleasant to work with.
Yeah, there's a lot of that going around in the open source world. I've heard of this other project that's stifling growth in a major segment of industry by not implementing the de-facto standard extensions that its commercial competitor uses. You might have heard of it, it's called Mozilla.
I admit that I haven't touch FORTRAN since about 1985, so forgive me if I'm not exactly up on the state of the art. From a little googling, it looks to me like g77 is pretty much an orphaned project. This is free software, man, developed and supported by the community. Have you considered volunteering to fix the parts you think are broken? Or volunteering to work on the f95 compiler effort?
I don't know how practical it would be, so feel free to tell me why no sane ISP would go for it:)
Because it's just one more thing that 99% of their customers won't understand and will end up calling tech support about. They'll either end up blocking more than they should ("Hmmm... That 'insecure' web browsing sounds scary, so I'll block port 80. I can still use the 'secure' port 443, right?") or, more likely, just take the ISP's defaults anyway.
The only way an ISP can work with this is to block the "uncommon" ports by default, then provide some way to those of us who actually need those ports to open them back up.
Of course, there's the danger. Once ports get closed "for security", good luck getting them opened again. Remember, most first-tier tech support thinks "Internet" and "Internet Explorer" are synonyms.
The password to my home firewall is written in large, friendly letters on a piece of paper taped to the firewall box itself. Sure, if someone broke into my house they'd get the password, but since they'd get the firewall as well I suspect that's the least of my worries.
Amen, brother! You just can't rely on metadata stored separately from the file itself. If I ZIP a file, or transfer it via XMODEM, or copy it onto an obsolete FAT-formatted floppy, that file should retain all it needs to be usable.
Some metadata is bound to be lost, such as its modification time or even its filename. If you can afford to lose this sort of metadata, then go ahead and store it separately. But if the file can't afford to lose this stuff you'd better make sure it's part of the data, not just the metadata. It'd better transfer intact when I send the file serially or copy it to and from a legacy filesystem.
I kinda like the Enterprise episode where they found the Borg buried in the Arctic. It followed very nicely from the Next Gen "First Contact" movie.
Of course, the fact that the Enterprise and crew wasn't seen for the first quarter of the show didn't hurt anything... Most of the other episodes stunk.
This is great news! I loved the original. Cataclysm wasn't as good, but it enhanced the UI just enough to make it annoying to try to control the original again. I'm glad I'll be able to try the Homeworld 2 before shelling out for the full game. (Ah, who am I kidding? It'd take some pretty major suckage to keep me from buying it anyway.)
Hope it hits the stores before Saturday. It's my birthday, so it's the one day a year my wife can't really complain about me going and buying a game.
I wish more 3D programs used something like Homeworld's navigation UI. For example, I'm using a 3D architecture program to plan some home remodelling. I find that Homeworld's 3D focus/pan/zoom UI is better than any other "serious" program out there. (No, I haven't tried professional 3D modelling programs, so don't bother flaming me about how SoftImage or Maya is so much nicer.)
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Just a data point: I graduated college with a BSEE degree in fall 1988 and started working pretty much the first of the year in 1989. My starting salary working in the Chicago area was $32k. Using the Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator that works out to about $47k in 2003 dollars.
At the time $32k was considered slightly above average for starting pay for an engineer. On the other hand, engineers were in higher demand then. These days I'd think $40k would be about average.
According to this Salary Wizard the US national average pay for a "Software Engineer I" is $52,364. Take that however you want. It sounds pretty high to me.
Right. Looking at my pay for 2003, 19% went to taxes (federal and state) and 13% went to my co-payment of medical benefits. Added together that's a 32% hit taken out of my gross pay.
So US taxes may be lower than Canadian but net take-home pay is roughly the same percentage.
Embrace and extend, baby! Embrace and extend!
Another nice tool (Windows only, sorry) is Total Recorder from High Criteria. It installs an audio driver shim and can record audio from any source. Essentially, if you can hear it on your PC's speakers, you can record it. I use it for time-shifting and for converting RealAudio and other streams into MP3 for my portable player.
Damn! I knew we should have been sending probes to Venus!
While I agree with most of your post, I have to disagree with this line. That is the promoted use of it, and is quite a good use. However, there's a not-so-well hidden agenda of advertising. When I got my new phone, Verizon was specifically saying that they have plans to use the system to provide "location-based services". That is, based on your location they will send advertisements and instant coupons for nearby businesses.
"John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."
Emergency services are also provided, as a way to convince people we need this. You want to be safe don't you? Fortunately, my phone (and many other models, I'm sure) give me the option to transmit the aGPS data with every call or just with calls to 911. This is something I can live with. The service is there when I have a real emergency, but (unless the phone is lying to me) that information isn't available to advertisers.
Someone in another thread said that the location system doesn't really use GPS. That's not quite true. The cellphone "Assisted GPS" service does use the GPS satellite system, but doesn't need a full GPS receiver in the phone itself. It also uses data from the tower. The IEEE magazine "Computer" had a good summary of the technology. A PDF of the article is at http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~postPC/docs/Geolocation_ assistedGPS.pdf
I don't mind; I don't live in Wyoming.
But what kind of weenie programmer would use decimal for cryin' out loud? Hex, baby, hex!
Oh well, at least the billboard didn't start with "Dim msg As String".
I do this with every game I buy. I started doing it with my kids' games, when I got tired of them scratching the fscking CDs all the time. Rip 'em and leave the CDs on a shelf, out of reach. Worked like a charm. Then I found just how freakin' convenient it was for my own stuff. A single click mounts the appropriate CD and fires up the app. I bought a 120G drive for my file server just to store ISOs on. Now I have a box full of pristine only-used-once CDs and a server full of ISOs. Life is good.
Agreed, on both counts. Although I've had to fight tooth and nail to keep my management from shipping an HTA I wrote as a demo for the marketing department. "It works. Why not ship it?" Arrrrrrgghhhh!
I find HTAs very handy. I can wrap one of those around a Perl script and have an instant GUI. I don't know VB, and have only passing familiarity with JavaScript. But I do know HTML, and can slap together an HTML form in no time. Works like a charm for those moments when a CLI just doesn't cut it. It's a way this embedded hacker can whip up something that looks nice to impress the front office.
Now, should the technique be patented? Hardly! I thought it was pretty obvious. I only stumbled across HTA after I'd come up with something similar myself, and was surprised to find official support for it in Windows.
Despite running in a web browser, HTAs have nothing to do with the web. They just coincidentally use the same markup language to implement the GUI for a local app.
I just wish I could use the W3 DOM instead of Microsoft's. *sigh*
TA is definitely my all-time favorite RTS. It had great depth of gameplay; there was no one killer strategy. TA has tons of possible strategies and counter-strategies. Intelligence-gathering is key -- you need to know what your opponents are up to so you can counter them.
The game itself had a ton of balancing options, too. Prior to starting you could allow or disallow individual unit types. This could handicap a good player or just give the game a little more variation. Turn off the Advanced Aircraft plants, for example, if you want a grunt war.
The control scheme was great. You could queue orders for any unit, including buildings. You could assign buildings to control groups, so any new units produced there were automatically assigned to a group. I always assign my main production buildings to groups, and give them a perimeter patrol path that emerging units will follow. Then queue up a bunch of units and go off to focus on something else, content that the units will be built and not just stand around looking like a big target.
UberHack was a great mod for the game, too. It added a lot of new features to the game. Best. Mod. Ever. TA with Uberhack became a lunch-hour favorite for better than a year where I was working at the time.
Too late. A friend of mine is an IT consultant. He's run into exactly that sort of problem with male and female connectors and an uptight customer.
Ah, that's only because you've never read TTT. Now, that is certainly the driest, most boring read imaginable. Never could make it through that one, myself.
Um, isn't it still about 5 months until April 1st?
In the workplace, someone can sue (and win) over a one-time offense. Many employers are taking a zero-tolerance policy about it, meaning that if someone even suggests to the human resources department that they've been offended, the offender is out on his ass without a hearing.
And, since most workers are "at-will" employees, there's nothing that can be done. The company can fire them whenever, for whatever, and the employee has no recourse unless he can show that the company was acting in a discriminatory fashion against him. Oh, and if you're a white male of European descent, you can't be discriminated against.
Been there, got fired for that. In my case the offense was racial instead of sexual. I meant no offense, and would certainly have apologized had I been given a chance. Nope. Zero tolerance, simply because they were afraid the offended person might sue. I never found out who I offended, never got a chance to apologize, and was told by two different workers-rights lawyers that the only thing I could do was to get my resume together.
The world is nuts.
Frankly, I prefer Professor Peter Schickele's New Horizons in Music Appreciation as a way of distributing performance notes during a concert.
My friends and I get together once a year and do this sort of thing. I would highly recommend burying the mortar tube! Catastrophic failure of the tube is no fun if shrapnel perforates the onlookers. We tend to get about a 17-second flight time on bowling balls, and have indeed had at least one tube failure.
We also tend to get at least one visit each year from the local sheriff. They're cool with it (and like to watch!) as long as we stop the booms by nightfall. The neighbors, 3 miles away, tend to complain.
Oh, and 400 pounds of burning thermite is a truly beautiful sight...
I'm an engineer, and have worked in two shops which used time sheets for project tracking. The first one (a little place where the Dilbert factory approached unity) had about a gazillion categories in which to log time, with sub-categories and sub-sub-categories galore. Most people ended up putting in "40 hours misc" every week. The really conscientious ones might have actually broken that down by project. The numbers, of course, became gospel for estimation of future projects.
The second place had a bit better idea how a tracking system should be run, but a piss-poor implementation. The hours had to be manually logged into their "timeclock" program, which was slow and buggy. Later they went to an web-browser client that was even worse, taking 30-60 seconds just to move from one field to the next! The engineers actually rebelled against it, refusing to enter any times at all. And guess what? Turns out nobody really noticed...
BTW, at the first place I decided to track my own hours the right way. I found a program that let me define my own categories. Click a category and time automatically started accumulating until you clicked something else. (I think it was called 'timex' or 'xtime', circa 1990.) I set up a category for each of my projects, without all the extraneous crap the regular program had. I also set up a few categories for different sorts of interruptions. I used this program pretty religiously for about a year, and was kind of disturbed to find that only about 30% of my time was going into actual budgeted projects. Everything else was off-topic. I haven't tracked time as closely anywhere else, but subjectively it seems that this 30% figure is pretty universal.
You do realize that all of these technologies do require power when the screen changes, right? So if you're doing video you're consuming power. This may be one reason it's called "digital paper", not "low-power video". And, as such, the chief applications will be replacing static paper displays with mostly-static digital paper displays.
Yeah, there's a lot of that going around in the open source world. I've heard of this other project that's stifling growth in a major segment of industry by not implementing the de-facto standard extensions that its commercial competitor uses. You might have heard of it, it's called Mozilla.
I admit that I haven't touch FORTRAN since about 1985, so forgive me if I'm not exactly up on the state of the art. From a little googling, it looks to me like g77 is pretty much an orphaned project. This is free software, man, developed and supported by the community. Have you considered volunteering to fix the parts you think are broken? Or volunteering to work on the f95 compiler effort?
Because it's just one more thing that 99% of their customers won't understand and will end up calling tech support about. They'll either end up blocking more than they should ("Hmmm... That 'insecure' web browsing sounds scary, so I'll block port 80. I can still use the 'secure' port 443, right?") or, more likely, just take the ISP's defaults anyway.
The only way an ISP can work with this is to block the "uncommon" ports by default, then provide some way to those of us who actually need those ports to open them back up.
Of course, there's the danger. Once ports get closed "for security", good luck getting them opened again. Remember, most first-tier tech support thinks "Internet" and "Internet Explorer" are synonyms.
The password to my home firewall is written in large, friendly letters on a piece of paper taped to the firewall box itself. Sure, if someone broke into my house they'd get the password, but since they'd get the firewall as well I suspect that's the least of my worries.
I wonder if the Australian Customs office used this method...?
Amen, brother! You just can't rely on metadata stored separately from the file itself. If I ZIP a file, or transfer it via XMODEM, or copy it onto an obsolete FAT-formatted floppy, that file should retain all it needs to be usable.
Some metadata is bound to be lost, such as its modification time or even its filename. If you can afford to lose this sort of metadata, then go ahead and store it separately. But if the file can't afford to lose this stuff you'd better make sure it's part of the data, not just the metadata. It'd better transfer intact when I send the file serially or copy it to and from a legacy filesystem.
I kinda like the Enterprise episode where they found the Borg buried in the Arctic. It followed very nicely from the Next Gen "First Contact" movie.
Of course, the fact that the Enterprise and crew wasn't seen for the first quarter of the show didn't hurt anything... Most of the other episodes stunk.
This is great news! I loved the original. Cataclysm wasn't as good, but it enhanced the UI just enough to make it annoying to try to control the original again. I'm glad I'll be able to try the Homeworld 2 before shelling out for the full game. (Ah, who am I kidding? It'd take some pretty major suckage to keep me from buying it anyway.)
Hope it hits the stores before Saturday. It's my birthday, so it's the one day a year my wife can't really complain about me going and buying a game.
I wish more 3D programs used something like Homeworld's navigation UI. For example, I'm using a 3D architecture program to plan some home remodelling. I find that Homeworld's 3D focus/pan/zoom UI is better than any other "serious" program out there. (No, I haven't tried professional 3D modelling programs, so don't bother flaming me about how SoftImage or Maya is so much nicer.)