perhaps it would be more correct to say "In the US this was originally called media shifting and held as legal for cassettes many year ago but the way things are rapidly heading in your country, it appears it will soon be illegal because MPAA and RIAA appear to have the ticket to write, rewrite and then freely interpret copyright law without fear of reprimand".
I thought my way was funnier... I've been wrong before.
Because macrovision is so important on a computer; I know that there are hunders of pirates out there with videos plugged in to the macrovision disabled TV out on their pc's just recording high quality DVD's onto vhs, watching and intently pausing and skipping adverts and messages.
Naturally none of these guys ever just decrypts the data on the dvd, strips out just the movie and audio track and re-encodes in onto a vcd or dvd4 with an automagic program, no, as this is clearly much more difficult;
Face it, Macrovision is done, obsolete; It is no longer an impediment, or even reasonable barrier to copy protection; its only remaining function is to prevent FAIR USE.
As with my CD's, I rip all of my DVDs into divx files which I store on the hard drive of my HTPC so I can choose the video/audio I want from the comfort of the sofa; this is perfectly legal in Australia, we call it "media shifting"; for those of you in the US, I believe this is called "Piracy". You see, we still have to comit a crime before we get punished for it down here;)
Once upon a time, there was a Land of the Free, called the United States of America, where such freedoms were protected by law; but then an evil fairy by the name of Bono came along and stole all of those freedoms in the name of keeping a mouse eared tool of Nazi Propaganda in the hands of a large corporation (lets not think about why you would want to continue to own such a thing)long after the death of its misguided creator; now those who love freedom must run to hallowed sanctuaries like Australia or New Zealand, where we are still free... thought the dark evil stain of North American Copyright Law has leapt the big pond and now begins to tarnish our beautiful Australia; man, New Zealand is going to be crowded soon:)
wow, where did that soapbox come from??? sorry guys:) err! jak
The are *going* to machine them... the bloody well should have done this in the first place, basic RULE of design engineering.
My god, in the Automotive industry (which is possibly the least technologically advanced and most basic industry known to man), it is *REQUIRED* that we design components to be (to borrow the Japanese Phrase) "Poka Yoke" (idiot proof, I believe) or the products and equipment will not be approved for manufacture. Even if it is a pointless clip that holds your cup holder lid shut;
This being the case, it is inconcievable to me that the Engineers designing such a critical piece of Aerospace; I mean real, serious Mechanical Engineers making kiddy mistakes is unforgiveable and embarassing to all of us.
Even if this mistake didn't kill people, the fact that it could have should mean that the designers responsible get fired and blacklisted at the very least; hell, "Critical Gear Assembled Backwards" should have had a 10 on their preliminary design FMEA and had action taken.
In case it isn't clear by now, I am stunned at this as it represents a basic failure of modern Mechanical Engineering; and before you say "it was built in the `80's" or similar, modern Design For Failure techniques came about as a result of Apollo 13 so the entire shuttle program post-dates these techniques.
This, more than anything else, is a point for the open source "many eyes" model.
Bugger me with a fish fork!! Any sane government should have declared a union whose action DIRECTLY LEADS to the risk of release of contagions which *NEED* BSL-4 as a terrorist group and taken military action long before now.
As for safety, I was under the impression that BSL-4's required incendiary self-destruct in case of catastrophic failure of containment; at least they do here in Australia. Of course, AFAIK we only have 1 here.
Of course, this is assuming that people are forgetting to refuel your on-site diesel generators and the solar panels are not cleaned regularly; you *DO* have power backup for a facility where failure leads to human-at-risk situations, do you not???
Hell, if MikeRowe can get caned for domain squatting, surely these dickheads can. Failing that, are there any recently retired commandos around??
Sorry, but folks like this really yank my chain. Freeloaders who drag arse over the principles of an organisation whose work they unabashedly co-opt.:) Ill settle down now, or *I* might infringe on rageboys copyright...
A blank CD-RW costs $0.90 (AUD) or so, a blank floppy costs about $1.10. The CD not only holds better than 400 Floppies worth of data, it is cheaper to boot. So, explain to me how the floppy is economical.. particularly since the floppy *might* survive a couple of hundred rewrites and the CD-RW is good for 10k or so.;) more $0.02
I rekon a CD is more likely to survive harsh treatment (if in a sleeve) than a floppy.
I havent had a floppy (on ANY of my PCs) for about 4 years now. I retired my last NON CD removable media (a jazz drive) 2 years ago.
MINI CDs (I use the business card shaped ones and carry them in a card holder), USB drive, SD, PDA, IPOD, Mobile(cell;hand)phone?? hell, for small files, just email them to yourself.
I would have to say that better than 90% of the problems people I know enocunter is because someone told them to use a floppy; but failed to mention NEVER open a file from a floppy, copy it to a fixed drive or ram first. Floppies are unreliable, undersized and fragile; the sooner the world is rid of them the better.
For me growing up there were two things that helped.
The first has been mentioned alot, sport; specifically martial arts and cricket... I also cycled but that did little for social skills:)
However, the thing that helped most as a young teenager was when a mentor encouraged me to build a model, a mental macro if you will, of "normal" social behaviour. I then would run this model as a simulation before taking action (for a bright kid, this is a brief second or so of introspection before answering); It worked fantastically well (I managed to integrate with a large number of peers rapidly after learning this technique).
Neurotypicals are fairly consistent in their social responses, I still dont *get* social politics, I doubt I ever will, but I can *predict* (predict isn't the best word, approximate, perhaps) the response to an action or comment based on past observations and this "mental macro"; and most of social interaction is based on acting and concealing the truth/opinions in any case, one of the first things I observed was the greatest negative response came when I answered polite interogatories with truth/fact (how do I look? what do you think of my new *insert object*?) etc:)
Of course, this assumes you are dealing with an Asberger's case like myself or something similar.
You will still encounter gifted neurotypicals who have no inherent deficiency in relation to social interaction, they are just to arrogant and inconsiderate to care either way... people like this can't be helped.
Of course, I could just be full of shit;) hope this helps err! jak
Sure, we have only 19odd million people, but from the outset our mobiles ("cell's") have had separate area codes, originally the area codes indicated carrier, but now we have number portability, we just recognise a mobile number from its 04xx (or +614xx) prefix but cant infer carrier anymore.
my major concern is that the leader of the nation who is first up there not decide to ceremonailly mark the territory... talk about a pissing contest:)
Whilst it bothers me when Warner put a bloody advert for their shitehouse amusement park in Queensland in stream with the start of the Matrix DVD; I have no issue with a realistic looking billboard in the background of a game scene or movie scene; I have a problem with being forced to watch an advert that is out of context!!!
On-ground advertising, sponser labels are all *REAL* parts of sport; good on them for finding a non-invasive way of presenting this and marketing this (if only they would use the money to develop better new games rather than tweaking what they already have...).
The thing I like most about the Russian Venus missions is the sheer bloody mindedness with which they approached it.
(to paraphrase a documentary interview I once saw)"We had no idea what to expect, so we built something that seemed strong and sent it... It failed, but we knew why so we built a better one..." a process they repeated until one acutally survived landing... now, *THATS* evolution;)
You dickhead, the "Forever Flashlight" has absolutely NOTHING to do with Piezoelectric crystals and the self charging laptop uses the same principle... It uses Faradays principle of induction in the guise of a copper coil and a magnet... The Piezoelectric effect is very cool, but you have failed to give us any examples of it.
The same induction principle could be used to power nanoscale devices; but nano scale devices will most likely be powered chemically (like our metabolism) as the strain required to generate the electricity is likely to crush the nanoscale device against said crystal...
So many stupid people, so few bullets. "Congratulations Bladric, you must be the first person in history to spell Christmas without getting any of the letters right" -The Black Adder's Christmas Carol
Firstly, as another poster said; a bloody good idea for a summer camp.
Secondly; Gimp, Openoffice are all good suggestions, as is Blender. I would include Cinepaing (used to be filmgimp, *serious* digital video editing software used by many movie houses); Naturally throw in POVray and some other modellers to play with.
Gentoo (www.gentoo.org) has some good tools now available to make custom liveCD's which may help.
Throwing on Americas Army and UT2003/4 demos adds the fun factor for FPS nuts, but maybe include freeciv too (or any one of the many open source RTS out there)... naturally, a rogue clone is critical;)
Where possible, ensure that you add the win32 binaries since alot of these people will have windows at home and may want to install on their preferred OS.
Make sure you pick a gnome or kde desktop that looks as much like Windows as possible to minimise learning curves.
Id also suggest including bluefish (a nice openoffice based web development tool) and perhaps some nice gui development tools as there may be some more advanced types that want to play with coding, web development or scripting.
Ok, maybe most of the population doesnt think generating PERL haiku is fun, but some of us do;)
I tend to (1) book my entire calendar so that people must contact me directly to arrange a meeting and (2) outright refuse to attend any discussion which doesn't have a published agenda or where I see nothing project related or requiring discussion on the agenda.
Furthermore, if I must attend a presentation or training session and the presenter starts to read off his own slides I tell them to just email me the slides and walk out; I can read and remember them in a fraction the time it takes him to read them to me.
My team and I just do our jobs and we are bloody good at it. No touchy feely crap; we are at work to work, we can socialise on our own time. Oddly enough, we are the only folks who consistently outrank the rest of the engineering team at performance reviews and tend to leave on time at 1630~1700 (whats the point of working 10 hour days and outputting 2/3's as much???). Of course, I hand picked my guys to be severe asberger-cases and incurable geeks like me;)
Guess there is a reason why one of the two most common phrases used to describe me is "does not play well with others", fortunately the other one relates to my being good at what I do, so people still hire me... lol err! jak.
"just keep your cool (don't get pissed off/frustrated), pick your battles, and be willing to compromise.
-fren"
I agree mostly, but NEVER, EVER compromise. You are negotiating a job contract, not volunteering for indentured slavery. Have a contract modified so that (1) your time is your time, (2) you get adequate allowance to book and take paid leave, (3) inventions not related to your current projects on your time on your equipment (dont use the company notebook!) are yours, (4) *DONT* accept a company phone, use your own and claim valid calls; this is a hook that allows them to claim eminent domain, (5) Remove any and all uncompensated non-compete clauses (once you leave they dont own you, just the reasonable assumption that you wont reveal the specifics of your projects; an offence for which they could prosecute you anyway) and (6) *NEVER* negotiate from a position of weakness, always be prepared to walk away; if you ever need them more than they need you, you are in trouble.
Better to deliver pizzas than get sued for patching a minor bug in the 2.6.1 kernel. We all need a means to support ourselves in this brave new world; but *NEVER* compromise your self or your future for the sake of an income now. The corporation doesnt respect you or see you as anything more than a tick on their head count and will absolutely not give anything beyond contracted compensation to you; so why sacrifice so much for them??
I also recommend working hard to develop differentiating characteristics which will ensure that you are more highly sought after than the next meatbag. A patent or two (a *REAL* patent, not a method patent), a demonstrably broad skill base (what, mechatronic engineering degree, live fire combat experience, C#, C++, Perl, MSCE's *AND* COBOL??? wow, we dont see that everyday), a *shudder* MBA (as a last resort, because if you actually *learn* anything studying an MBA you are fairly retarded to begin with; and everyone has one these days), get some articles published... something; seriously, devote some time to it and one or two of the above isn't that hard to produce. If you stand out from other candidates, it is easier to negotiate a reasonable contract.
"...better IT education from an early age is needed. The author of the article writes "[s]cript kiddies often have only a dim idea of how the code works and little concern for how a digital plague can rage out of control." It looks like we need to do a better job (than the seemingly non-existant now) in teaching children why they shouldn't cut and paste "strange code" and what the consequences are of doing such a thing. It is not enough to say "don't do it." "
Hear, Hear!
This goes a step further; people should be educated such that they dont want to do anything which disrupts another's life, liberty or freedom.
Case in point, dont restrict our freedom so that it is no longer possible to plan and execute the hijacking of a plane to park it in some architecture; educate people to the point where they no longer choose to do this....sorry, I seem to be camped on a soap box this morning... err! jak.
"The gun lobby's insistence on our constitutional right to bear arms is the most amusing. Most of them know we have no such 'constitutional right' in Australia, but they'll still quote it because it sounds good to themselves."
Politicing aside, the idea of a firearm in the hands of anyone without a sniper patch outright terrifies me; Consider that every round which misses its intended target goes somewhere, and that somewhere could be me!!
Of course If I am the intended target, it serves me right for letting them find me;)
...from training *Real* (read Mechanical) engineers.
You begin with the basics; (drawing, CAD modelling, math, physics, fluid and thermodynamics) and then you move up to applying these techniques to more and more complex systems until you peak with project management, limit state design etc. Essentially you learn the fundementals, then learn how the tools are designed and built, then how the tools work then how to use the tools; now you know how to create solutions to problems no-one else has ever encountered because you understand the cause, not just the effect.
I firmly agree that the only way to teach something is to start with the foundations and move up; although to critique all the programmers I know, they could benefit from a LOT more mathematics, particularly in the areas of numerical methods and non-linear differential equations.
Teach people how to solve abstracted problems (ie: simply make on-paper mathematical soultions to problems); teach them how computers *actually* work and then teach them about how the tools (HLLs) are built and work; let them make their own choices from there. Why should a class teach "C++", shouldn't it teach object oriented programming and let students select which tool they feel is most appropriate??
Hell, somethings are better done in Perl than C++, C++ than Fortran, Fortran than assembler, machine code; if you aren't trained to understand *HOW* tools work, you will never be able select the correct tool for a job or even design better tools. More importantly, if your training focusses on a specific tool or brand of tools, you wont know how they all work.
Case in point, I, a mechatronic engineer, know far more languages than any one of my comp-sci/programming mates but still use them equally well, because I was taught not how to use a specific language but how to solve problems, the languages I taught myself since I already understood *how* they worked; I knew the grammar, I just needed the dictionary as such.
... Analog watches dont need to be read, in fact, a quick glance at an analog clock provides us with a picture; which is processed into an understanding of the time much more quickly than a digital display which needs to be read and interpreted via the language centre of the brain.
Of course, a person not "familiar" with an analog clock will take longer to read it, but with practice this time drops; time to read a digital clock remains fairly static and relates to a persons native reading speed and numerical literacy.
Of course, I could just be full of shit:) err! jak.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm, humor as an exact science... Now *that* would be an interesting thesis to write.
err!
jak.
guess you missed the sarcasm then :)
perhaps it would be more correct to say "In the US this was originally called media shifting and held as legal for cassettes many year ago but the way things are rapidly heading in your country, it appears it will soon be illegal because MPAA and RIAA appear to have the ticket to write, rewrite and then freely interpret copyright law without fear of reprimand".
I thought my way was funnier... I've been wrong before.
Because macrovision is so important on a computer; I know that there are hunders of pirates out there with videos plugged in to the macrovision disabled TV out on their pc's just recording high quality DVD's onto vhs, watching and intently pausing and skipping adverts and messages.
;)
:)
:)
Naturally none of these guys ever just decrypts the data on the dvd, strips out just the movie and audio track and re-encodes in onto a vcd or dvd4 with an automagic program, no, as this is clearly much more difficult;
Face it, Macrovision is done, obsolete; It is no longer an impediment, or even reasonable barrier to copy protection; its only remaining function is to prevent FAIR USE.
As with my CD's, I rip all of my DVDs into divx files which I store on the hard drive of my HTPC so I can choose the video/audio I want from the comfort of the sofa; this is perfectly legal in Australia, we call it "media shifting"; for those of you in the US, I believe this is called "Piracy". You see, we still have to comit a crime before we get punished for it down here
Once upon a time, there was a Land of the Free, called the United States of America, where such freedoms were protected by law; but then an evil fairy by the name of Bono came along and stole all of those freedoms in the name of keeping a mouse eared tool of Nazi Propaganda in the hands of a large corporation (lets not think about why you would want to continue to own such a thing)long after the death of its misguided creator; now those who love freedom must run to hallowed sanctuaries like Australia or New Zealand, where we are still free... thought the dark evil stain of North American Copyright Law has leapt the big pond and now begins to tarnish our beautiful Australia; man, New Zealand is going to be crowded soon
wow, where did that soapbox come from???
sorry guys
err!
jak
The are *going* to machine them... the bloody well should have done this in the first place, basic RULE of design engineering.
My god, in the Automotive industry (which is possibly the least technologically advanced and most basic industry known to man), it is *REQUIRED* that we design components to be (to borrow the Japanese Phrase) "Poka Yoke" (idiot proof, I believe) or the products and equipment will not be approved for manufacture. Even if it is a pointless clip that holds your cup holder lid shut;
This being the case, it is inconcievable to me that the Engineers designing such a critical piece of Aerospace; I mean real, serious Mechanical Engineers making kiddy mistakes is unforgiveable and embarassing to all of us.
Even if this mistake didn't kill people, the fact that it could have should mean that the designers responsible get fired and blacklisted at the very least; hell, "Critical Gear Assembled Backwards" should have had a 10 on their preliminary design FMEA and had action taken.
In case it isn't clear by now, I am stunned at this as it represents a basic failure of modern Mechanical Engineering; and before you say "it was built in the `80's" or similar, modern Design For Failure techniques came about as a result of Apollo 13 so the entire shuttle program post-dates these techniques.
This, more than anything else, is a point for the open source "many eyes" model.
err!
jak
:) yes, and I do it on purpose, silly chrome gizmos they are... but my autonomous female unit likes them...
err!
jak
Bugger me with a fish fork!! Any sane government should have declared a union whose action DIRECTLY LEADS to the risk of release of contagions which *NEED* BSL-4 as a terrorist group and taken military action long before now.
As for safety, I was under the impression that BSL-4's required incendiary self-destruct in case of catastrophic failure of containment; at least they do here in Australia. Of course, AFAIK we only have 1 here.
Of course, this is assuming that people are forgetting to refuel your on-site diesel generators and the solar panels are not cleaned regularly; you *DO* have power backup for a facility where failure leads to human-at-risk situations, do you not???
err!
jak
Hell, if MikeRowe can get caned for domain squatting, surely these dickheads can. Failing that, are there any recently retired commandos around??
:) Ill settle down now, or *I* might infringe on rageboys copyright...
Sorry, but folks like this really yank my chain. Freeloaders who drag arse over the principles of an organisation whose work they unabashedly co-opt.
err!
jak
Oh! yeah, economical my arse.
;) more $0.02
A blank CD-RW costs $0.90 (AUD) or so, a blank floppy costs about $1.10. The CD not only holds better than 400 Floppies worth of data, it is cheaper to boot. So, explain to me how the floppy is economical.. particularly since the floppy *might* survive a couple of hundred rewrites and the CD-RW is good for 10k or so.
err!
jak
I rekon a CD is more likely to survive harsh treatment (if in a sleeve) than a floppy.
I havent had a floppy (on ANY of my PCs) for about 4 years now. I retired my last NON CD removable media (a jazz drive) 2 years ago.
MINI CDs (I use the business card shaped ones and carry them in a card holder), USB drive, SD, PDA, IPOD, Mobile(cell;hand)phone?? hell, for small files, just email them to yourself.
I would have to say that better than 90% of the problems people I know enocunter is because someone told them to use a floppy; but failed to mention NEVER open a file from a floppy, copy it to a fixed drive or ram first. Floppies are unreliable, undersized and fragile; the sooner the world is rid of them the better.
err!
jak
...within.
:)
:)
;)
For me growing up there were two things that helped.
The first has been mentioned alot, sport; specifically martial arts and cricket... I also cycled but that did little for social skills
However, the thing that helped most as a young teenager was when a mentor encouraged me to build a model, a mental macro if you will, of "normal" social behaviour. I then would run this model as a simulation before taking action (for a bright kid, this is a brief second or so of introspection before answering); It worked fantastically well (I managed to integrate with a large number of peers rapidly after learning this technique).
Neurotypicals are fairly consistent in their social responses, I still dont *get* social politics, I doubt I ever will, but I can *predict* (predict isn't the best word, approximate, perhaps) the response to an action or comment based on past observations and this "mental macro"; and most of social interaction is based on acting and concealing the truth/opinions in any case, one of the first things I observed was the greatest negative response came when I answered polite interogatories with truth/fact (how do I look? what do you think of my new *insert object*?) etc
Of course, this assumes you are dealing with an Asberger's case like myself or something similar.
You will still encounter gifted neurotypicals who have no inherent deficiency in relation to social interaction, they are just to arrogant and inconsiderate to care either way... people like this can't be helped.
Of course, I could just be full of shit
hope this helps
err!
jak
...like they do in Australia ;)
Sure, we have only 19odd million people, but from the outset our mobiles ("cell's") have had separate area codes, originally the area codes indicated carrier, but now we have number portability, we just recognise a mobile number from its 04xx (or +614xx) prefix but cant infer carrier anymore.
just a pointless $0.02
err!
jak
Hell,
:)
my major concern is that the leader of the nation who is first up there not decide to ceremonailly mark the territory... talk about a pissing contest
err!
jak
Whilst it bothers me when Warner put a bloody advert for their shitehouse amusement park in Queensland in stream with the start of the Matrix DVD; I have no issue with a realistic looking billboard in the background of a game scene or movie scene; I have a problem with being forced to watch an advert that is out of context!!!
On-ground advertising, sponser labels are all *REAL* parts of sport; good on them for finding a non-invasive way of presenting this and marketing this (if only they would use the money to develop better new games rather than tweaking what they already have...).
The thing I like most about the Russian Venus missions is the sheer bloody mindedness with which they approached it.
;)
(to paraphrase a documentary interview I once saw)"We had no idea what to expect, so we built something that seemed strong and sent it... It failed, but we knew why so we built a better one..." a process they repeated until one acutally survived landing... now, *THATS* evolution
;) looks like instant karma came and got me.
Fortunately I always save the last bullet for myself.
lol
You dickhead, the "Forever Flashlight" has absolutely NOTHING to do with Piezoelectric crystals and the self charging laptop uses the same principle... It uses Faradays principle of induction in the guise of a copper coil and a magnet... The Piezoelectric effect is very cool, but you have failed to give us any examples of it.
The same induction principle could be used to power nanoscale devices; but nano scale devices will most likely be powered chemically (like our metabolism) as the strain required to generate the electricity is likely to crush the nanoscale device against said crystal...
So many stupid people, so few bullets.
"Congratulations Bladric, you must be the first person in history to spell Christmas without getting any of the letters right"
-The Black Adder's Christmas Carol
...I feel the need to add my $0.02.
;)
;)
Firstly, as another poster said; a bloody good idea for a summer camp.
Secondly; Gimp, Openoffice are all good suggestions, as is Blender. I would include Cinepaing (used to be filmgimp, *serious* digital video editing software used by many movie houses); Naturally throw in POVray and some other modellers to play with.
Gentoo (www.gentoo.org) has some good tools now available to make custom liveCD's which may help.
Throwing on Americas Army and UT2003/4 demos adds the fun factor for FPS nuts, but maybe include freeciv too (or any one of the many open source RTS out there)... naturally, a rogue clone is critical
Where possible, ensure that you add the win32 binaries since alot of these people will have windows at home and may want to install on their preferred OS.
Make sure you pick a gnome or kde desktop that looks as much like Windows as possible to minimise learning curves.
Id also suggest including bluefish (a nice openoffice based web development tool) and perhaps some nice gui development tools as there may be some more advanced types that want to play with coding, web development or scripting.
Ok, maybe most of the population doesnt think generating PERL haiku is fun, but some of us do
err!
jak.
Hear! Hear! savagedome :)
;)
I tend to (1) book my entire calendar so that people must contact me directly to arrange a meeting and (2) outright refuse to attend any discussion which doesn't have a published agenda or where I see nothing project related or requiring discussion on the agenda.
Furthermore, if I must attend a presentation or training session and the presenter starts to read off his own slides I tell them to just email me the slides and walk out; I can read and remember them in a fraction the time it takes him to read them to me.
My team and I just do our jobs and we are bloody good at it. No touchy feely crap; we are at work to work, we can socialise on our own time. Oddly enough, we are the only folks who consistently outrank the rest of the engineering team at performance reviews and tend to leave on time at 1630~1700 (whats the point of working 10 hour days and outputting 2/3's as much???). Of course, I hand picked my guys to be severe asberger-cases and incurable geeks like me
Guess there is a reason why one of the two most common phrases used to describe me is "does not play well with others", fortunately the other one relates to my being good at what I do, so people still hire me... lol
err!
jak.
"just keep your cool (don't get pissed off/frustrated), pick your battles, and be willing to compromise.
-fren"
I agree mostly, but NEVER, EVER compromise. You are negotiating a job contract, not volunteering for indentured slavery. Have a contract modified so that (1) your time is your time, (2) you get adequate allowance to book and take paid leave, (3) inventions not related to your current projects on your time on your equipment (dont use the company notebook!) are yours, (4) *DONT* accept a company phone, use your own and claim valid calls; this is a hook that allows them to claim eminent domain, (5) Remove any and all uncompensated non-compete clauses (once you leave they dont own you, just the reasonable assumption that you wont reveal the specifics of your projects; an offence for which they could prosecute you anyway) and (6) *NEVER* negotiate from a position of weakness, always be prepared to walk away; if you ever need them more than they need you, you are in trouble.
Better to deliver pizzas than get sued for patching a minor bug in the 2.6.1 kernel. We all need a means to support ourselves in this brave new world; but *NEVER* compromise your self or your future for the sake of an income now. The corporation doesnt respect you or see you as anything more than a tick on their head count and will absolutely not give anything beyond contracted compensation to you; so why sacrifice so much for them??
I also recommend working hard to develop differentiating characteristics which will ensure that you are more highly sought after than the next meatbag. A patent or two (a *REAL* patent, not a method patent), a demonstrably broad skill base (what, mechatronic engineering degree, live fire combat experience, C#, C++, Perl, MSCE's *AND* COBOL??? wow, we dont see that everyday), a *shudder* MBA (as a last resort, because if you actually *learn* anything studying an MBA you are fairly retarded to begin with; and everyone has one these days), get some articles published... something; seriously, devote some time to it and one or two of the above isn't that hard to produce. If you stand out from other candidates, it is easier to negotiate a reasonable contract.
Just my $0.02.
err!
jak.
"...better IT education from an early age is needed. The author of the article writes "[s]cript kiddies often have only a dim idea of how the code works and little concern for how a digital plague can rage out of control." It looks like we need to do a better job (than the seemingly non-existant now) in teaching children why they shouldn't cut and paste "strange code" and what the consequences are of doing such a thing. It is not enough to say "don't do it." "
...sorry, I seem to be camped on a soap box this morning...
Hear, Hear!
This goes a step further; people should be educated such that they dont want to do anything which disrupts another's life, liberty or freedom.
Case in point, dont restrict our freedom so that it is no longer possible to plan and execute the hijacking of a plane to park it in some architecture; educate people to the point where they no longer choose to do this.
err!
jak.
"The gun lobby's insistence on our constitutional right to bear arms is the most amusing. Most of them know we have no such 'constitutional right' in Australia, but they'll still quote it because it sounds good to themselves."
;)
Politicing aside, the idea of a firearm in the hands of anyone without a sniper patch outright terrifies me; Consider that every round which misses its intended target goes somewhere, and that somewhere could be me!!
Of course If I am the intended target, it serves me right for letting them find me
Pah! a *real* programmer would hack together a hex input device and punch in the bootloader op-codes from memory ;)
...from training *Real* (read Mechanical) engineers.
You begin with the basics; (drawing, CAD modelling, math, physics, fluid and thermodynamics) and then you move up to applying these techniques to more and more complex systems until you peak with project management, limit state design etc. Essentially you learn the fundementals, then learn how the tools are designed and built, then how the tools work then how to use the tools; now you know how to create solutions to problems no-one else has ever encountered because you understand the cause, not just the effect.
I firmly agree that the only way to teach something is to start with the foundations and move up; although to critique all the programmers I know, they could benefit from a LOT more mathematics, particularly in the areas of numerical methods and non-linear differential equations.
Teach people how to solve abstracted problems (ie: simply make on-paper mathematical soultions to problems); teach them how computers *actually* work and then teach them about how the tools (HLLs) are built and work; let them make their own choices from there. Why should a class teach "C++", shouldn't it teach object oriented programming and let students select which tool they feel is most appropriate??
Hell, somethings are better done in Perl than C++, C++ than Fortran, Fortran than assembler, machine code; if you aren't trained to understand *HOW* tools work, you will never be able select the correct tool for a job or even design better tools. More importantly, if your training focusses on a specific tool or brand of tools, you wont know how they all work.
Case in point, I, a mechatronic engineer, know far more languages than any one of my comp-sci/programming mates but still use them equally well, because I was taught not how to use a specific language but how to solve problems, the languages I taught myself since I already understood *how* they worked; I knew the grammar, I just needed the dictionary as such.
Anyway, enough rambling...
err!
jak
;) A *real* gentoo user runs "time emerge -ep world" once a month even if they haven't upgraded anything... we just like the purty numbers...
hmm, methinks I need to cut back a little on the antibiotics..
err!
jak
... Analog watches dont need to be read, in fact, a quick glance at an analog clock provides us with a picture; which is processed into an understanding of the time much more quickly than a digital display which needs to be read and interpreted via the language centre of the brain.
:)
Of course, a person not "familiar" with an analog clock will take longer to read it, but with practice this time drops; time to read a digital clock remains fairly static and relates to a persons native reading speed and numerical literacy.
Of course, I could just be full of shit
err!
jak.