Considering that they'll deliver it and assemble it in 4-6 weeks, why didn't NASA just hire them for the real thing since they have their own shipping worked out.
Maybe there are benefits to this outsourcing thing after all.
There is no way we need $300M to finance ideas that the remaining $4.8 billion can't already handle. If we do need more money, interest rates are near an all time low so we'll just borrow it back or blackmail MSFT again. In the mean time, why pay the interest since it'll have negligible tax effect against earned interest on $4.8B.
More than anything I think it means that Apple doesn't see any investments that are guaranteed winners above 3%. If they already have that kind of war chest at their disposal, does an extra $300 million really get them anything?
Apple and Fred have been clear for some time that the war chest allows them to buy revenues. If Maya was in fact up for sale, Apple should have no problem writing a check for it. Apple can in fact write a check for either ATI or Nvidia if they really wanted to be in that market. They have options and are being judicious in how they use it.
There are a lot of comments here regarding appropriate means of evaluating, etc. I'm involved in developing and deploying assessment tools at a major university. Here's the deal:
1) Evaluations do correlate to grades assigned. Evaluation boosting is a real factor in grade inflation at many universities. It's not imaginary, and has been carefully studied.
2) At most major research universities evaluation usually don't play a significant role in tenure. A strong publication profile will overwhelm a mediocre evaluation profile. Most research universities that I'm familiar with do, however, use these evaluations to try to improve instruction. This is particularly true with non-tenure track instructors.
3) Evaluations really aren't particularly useful in instruction assessment. Studies have shown that students generate rather accurate assessments after only 5 seconds exposure to the instructors teaching style. They're more reflective of personality assessment (so are most job interviews, but that's a different thread) than instruction quality. Developing some kind of standardized system overlooks the fact that the surveys themselves are of limited value.
In spite of good intentions by universities the fact is that end-of-term evaluations just don't tell us anything particularly useful. Regardless of what students think of their instructors, the only really valid instruction assessment is direct measure: test what the students know when they enter the class, test what they know when they leave, see if the difference is what you expect in a semester and correlates closely with what students needed to learn. Indirect measure through surveys is useful, but mostly in trying to dissect what went wrong when the outcomes weren't met. Even then, you generally need direct observation by a 3rd party to identify specific actions to take.
Simply and incompassionately stated, who gives a shit if the guy can speak english provided the students learn what they need. If students don't learn what they need, that's the real issue, and then you walk back to figure out what went wrong. If you learned it, and the guy was a dick, the bottom line was that you learned it. Individually it says almost nothing about instruction and almost everything about the student, but collectively it says something provided that the starting and ending expectations are a reasonable distance apart.
What makes this difficult to implement is that the start and end of term student assessment *can't* be done by the instructor, rather by a 3rd party and then all manner of academic freedom issues crop up not to mention that it's a lot of extra work against strained budgets. BTW, the first programs that you'll see stepping up on this are engineering programs as part of their accreditation efforts.
This, by the way, is what has led us to standardized testing by absurdly overextending the 3rd party beyond that of the school board all the way to the district, then state, then nation. There's simply no value in determining if students aren't meeting outcomes if the assessors are so far removed from instruction that they can't provide meaningful feedback other than to say 'you're leaving students behind', and the people that actually can do something about it locally are so far removed from the assessment that they have no control of the situation.
But the bottom line is that sites such as this provide almost no meaningful feedback. Even sanctioned end-of-term evaluations provide almost no meaningful feedback related to instruction.
The problem is that the bill is designed for data theft, not for dipshits giving it away for free. Nevertheless, the bill requires that consumers whose data has been stolen be notified through viable means - email, letter, public notice if they can't be identified. Fines to the company for not doing this and the person responsible for the data is open to civil action.
The main problem I see from the article is that the impacted individuals may not be notified, which is just wrong. Granted, this kind of thing probably can't prevented (minimized, yes, stopped, no) but there's a right way to address the problem and a wrong way. At least notify the affected people of what's happened.
Well, in the midwest US, it's not uncommon for hailstones to be golfball size or larger. I witnessed softball sized hail pound the ever-loving shit out of a parking lot full of cars in Denver many years ago. Not just broken windshields, but every upward exposed body panel was dented. Traditional roofs are good at protecting passengers, but are hugely expensive to repair.
What I don't get, though seems to be changing, is the ongoing fascination with painted metal body panels, as if the auto industry made most of it's money out of collision repair, or something. Why not go with solid composite panels? Yeah, you lose that whole 'shiny' thing, but you also give up door dings, scratches, stone nicks, rust, *and* they'll hold up great to hailstones. A big storm will still take out your windows, but that's much harder to prevent and is fortunately much cheaper than body panels. I have a Saturn with metal hood/roof, but plastic door/fender/quarterpanels. The paint still scuffs, but no dents, which is better.
Is the only reason why we persist with painted metal body panels because they're pretty? Structurally, they really don't add much to the car.
And, of course, if you're skittish about the whole click-pause-click thing, you can click and hit enter and it'll edit the name, enter again to exit this mode. If you're really skittish about rename in place, either cmd-I and edit the name in the get info panel, or cmd-opt-I will keep the get info panel up as a floating menu and it'll reflect the current selection. Handy if you've got pixels to burn.
Apple has a solution to this, which has trade-offs, but seems pretty functional.
Essentially, each of their iLife apps is a replacement for the Finder. Do we really need music search integrated with file search? Or is it sufficient to build independent metadata (ID3) and filestructure (playlists) just for music. That's really the brilliance of iTunes in that it never takes you back to your HD filestructure. You can even ask it to maintain the HD filestructure to reflect the metadata structure, so it'll keep everything in an artist/album/song structure, naming things as needed.
iPhoto is set up the same way, but it's pretty apparent that the iPhoto guys are the 'B' team, since they haven't gotten it nearly as slick as iTunes yet, but it also has the equivalent of content metadata, playlists, and smart playlists. So, yes, I can easily find my wedding photos. The trade-off is that you can't search for 'Wedding' in the Finder and get wedding photos, wedding songs, etc. Maybe that's upcoming, but I'm not totally convinced of the value.
The iTunes organizational structure does carry into iPhoto, so if you want to select a song for a slideshow in iPhoto, you can see your iTunes playlists, and filter against metadata. It also carries into iMovie, etc.
Other posters have clearly identified the problems with metadata. File organization is generallly only useful if you are willing to symlink across all of your metadata, otherwise your photos of you mom and your wedding photos are disjoint, since some should be in both places. The single biggest problem with metadata is putting it in to begin with. iPhoto now allows you to do that during photo import - using a slide-show type UI.
I think MSs tendency to do everything in one place is interesting, but tends to not come off so well. Having everything in SQL could eliminate one of the shortcomings in Apple's implementation which is that they need to maintain an XML intermediate structure for music files, photos, etc. While somewhat handy, it's main function is to join file metadata and the FS, which means that it is somewhat fragile.
Quite honestly, there's nothing more useful than reserving 2GB on your iPod for an OS X Server install so you can boot your Xserve in an emergency. Xserve even comes with a front-mounted Firewire port specifically for this purpose.
I pretty much have my server emergency kit on me at all times.
Not knowing what your B.S. degree in (assuming you have one, of course, as it's not a requirement for medical school) you should consider graduate study in Biomedical Engineering.
Most certainly you'll have some undergraduate coursework to fill in, but you could go into areas such as biomechanics if you want to get your hands dirty or medical information systems if you want something more on the IT side.
Information systems, medical imaging and image analysis, biosignal analysis and processing, there's a pretty wide range of computational and traditional engineering focus areas that would benefit immensely from your experience.
Biomedical Engineering is still a growth field in this country, particularly in the R&D. Being an M.D. would make you uniquely qualified for clinical research, though that's largely a need outside of the information arena.
If you are interested in this path, talk to some universities that offer degrees and take some of the introductory coursework via satellite programs and get yourself admitted. A M.S. degree will be sufficient to get you into the job market and you can probably pull that off in about 3 years.
I've known a few people that have landed interviews *specifically* because of a listed outside interest. In all cases they were very interesting interests, but when you're looking at a lot of uniformly good resumes, it's worth focusing on interesting people.
I conduct a fair amount of interviews myself and I can't say that there are many tips to win someone like me over. Within 5 seconds of meeting you I'll decide whether or not this is going anywhere. If it starts out on the right note, you have one hour to not screw it up. Nobody recovers from that first impression if it's bad. I know it sounds like bad form, but everytime that I've been overruled on that point (a hire not reporting to me or below me), we're regretted it, and I've never hired a bad person from a good first impression. Not many people win me over in 5 seconds and keep that for an hour.
I don't believe in the greatest strengths/weaknesses stuff. I'll present you with a situation with no clear resolution and ask you to walk me through it. I'll do that half a dozen times and grill you about the decisions you make along the way. People almost always present me with a viable, but different solution, and their strengths and weaknesses are painfully obvious by the choices they make. I'll know if you're a team player, a multitasker, if you overpromise, if you're selfish, and so on. I'll also know if you're a bullshitter, if you know your stuff, etc. You can't possibly prepare for it since I've never asked a question that you've heard before.
Most of the candidates are technically capable of doing the job, so I'm really looking for people that fit into a team, that can be trusted to work unsupervised when that happens, who will grow into responsibility that we know is upcoming, etc. That's really what you can gain from the interview, though few people bother to really look for it. You also shouldn't need to meet with a dozen people to get hired - that's a sure sign that nobody is really in charge.
I'd like to see some statistics on how many people attempt to invade/evade the physical security checks at Netsol's NOC that require and necessitate facilties on that level. The same goes for most any datacenter - your physical security is awesome, but why?
Because some resources are so important that even a single breach can be devastating. It's a tough thing to engineer around. For resources like that, you calculate the cost of failure, identify a reasonable relative cost to invest to prevent that failure, and invest it in anything and everything that will get you there.
Security comes in two forms - that which prevents (active) and that which deters (passive). Passive can be very effective, or so believed most of the world during the cold war.
"I think it's important to point out in discussions like this, because they still get turned into David (Apple) vs. Goliath (MS) arguments more often than not. The fact is in terms of music it's at best two Goliaths. Neither of these companies believes in standards, except the ones they set themselves and then expect the rest of the world to follow whether the world likes it or not. "
I wonder why Apple should support WMA on the iPod when MS doesn't support WMA on the Mac? What kind of marketing problem does this create for Apple when Mac users can't play DRM WMA? On the other hand, Windows users can play DRM AAC files thanks to iTunes.
AAC is an open standard. WMA is not. There are no open DRM standards to choose among, as far as I know, so by definition DRM is proprietary, and given what it attempting to accomplish you can understand why opening DRM to a standards body is a bit of an obstacle.
It's interesting how DRM WMA provides users more choice, unless you have a Mac, and then you're fucked.
"All I am trying to say is that Apple, in general, has fewer devices and programs that can run on it. It seems like nearly all the hardware you can use on an Apple is sold by Apple themselves."
Uh, no. It only seems that way because oftentimes Apple's hardware is better than everybody elses, so Mac users buy it. Seriously, I *own* more non-Apple hardware than Apple makes. USB floppy drive, firewire HD, digital camera, printers, monitors, mice, keyboards, firewire burner, scanner, bar code scanner, remote controls, even multi-function devices.
The last time I explicity looked for Mac support was on a multifunction laser printer about 5 years ago.
Unfortunately, most tech scholarships are awarded by the universities themselves, so a school getting itself off the ground won't have much to work with yet.
The reason is that engineering/CS are notorious for their high attrition rates, and money given to entering students often goes to future business and psychology majors. Corporations do give quite a bit of merit money, but it goes straight to the engineering/CS schools who are typically quite experienced at identifying who are good candidates and who are not.
It's important to talk to the specific programs that you are interested, not to the larger campus since the scholarships are often tied to specific programs or to engineering as a whole. These scholarships are often offers, rather than applications, but you can certainly get your name in there.
Don't overlook working through school, tech majors often have access to some pretty well paying jobs - look at on-campus student tech support positions and off-campus internships and co-ops. You probably won't be able to work as must as some non-tech students because of your study load, but college loans are a very worthwhile investment and are readily available.
PalmOS was founded by former Apple employees, so this makes a lot of sense.
Apple's greatest contribution may not be it's spin on the UI or 3.5" floppies or mice or whatever, but the degree to which former Apple employees have taken lessons learned at Apple and applied them to so many new products and technologies over the last 20 years or so. So many successful startups were founded by former Apple employees.
When Coke was doing their blind product testing for New Coke, people liked the new recipe and Coke thought they were onto something. But a lot of people liked the original Coke because of those impressions - it reminded them of their first kiss, or going somewhere with their parents, etc.
When the formula changed, some people lost their connection to those impressions and declared that they didn't like the new formula - even if they picked it as a preference in a blind test. The problem was that Coke asked the wrong question in their assessment. They asked 'Which tastes better', rather than 'Which would you buy'. Coke is the product that empirically tastes worse, but people would prefer to buy. It's a catch-22 for Coke, since they crafted those impressions in the first place and are now have to live with them. If it was a ploy to switch from sugar to other sweeteners, then it backfired horribly.
If you think really hard, most people can identify some impressions such as this. My son will probably always associate Egg McMuffins with spending time with his father since that's a little habit we have (McD's is across the street from my house so we walk there for breakfast). I associate Dennys with going skiiing with my family, and so on.
Without question, the best bag I've ever used is a Waterfield Designs bag: http://www.sfbags.com/
There's nary a stitch out of place in 2 years of daily use. Yes, that buckle is an airline seat belt buckle. It's a very over-engineered bag. They sit very tight to the body. Many bags are balanced poorly and hang away from the body, but these hold to your body and don't sway when you walk.
They come in a range of sizes, have laptop sleeves that fit nicely with the bag, and accessory bags, iPod sleeves, etc. Check them out.
Well, there was never going to be an invasion of Japan. Japan began suggesting surrender as early as Feb 1945 - the main sticking point later in the negotiations being that we wanted something unconditional whereas the Japanese were insisting that the Emperor retain a non-political title.
The bombs did force an unconditional surrender, but more importantly, it stopped Stalin dead in his tracks, who we had recognized as a grave threat who was now moving aggressively toward Japan. The worst-case scenario here was that Stalin, weakened but holding far more control of Europe and Asia than he could have hoped, could move for a year-round port city on the Pacific. He was clearly willing to commit his citizens to the last man - his ability to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers, including women to their deaths scared the hell out of the other ally leaders. Stalin could move against Japan from the north and take territory from Japan that would be extremely valuable to Russia against a US enemy (Russia entered the war against Japan on Aug 8 by easily invading Manchuria). Stalin realized that the US was the only other power to escape WWII with any resources, and that the two would be in conflict.
Stalins best scenario was to move against Japan after a successful US invasion - both US and Japanese forces would be weak and the US would not be prepared for an invasion from the north. Russia could more easily bring forces to the location than the US, and Russia could win most or all of the island. Stalin realized that the US would buckle under the scale of the Russian army, particularly since the US public would oppose defending real estate given that the real enemy (Japan) was defeated.
The US position was difficult. We couldn't afford to invade given that scenario - Japan could be lost to Russia regardless of whether we defeated Japan or not. Quite possibly the bombs were viewed as the solution to both problems - first, we could quickly end the war with Japan without giving Russia time to become entrenched, and avoiding any further invasions. Second, we send a message to Stalin that we can defeat his armies without committing US soldiers, and that we can bring resources to bear much more quickly than he can (how long does it take to hopscotch a B-29 across the Pacific vs. mobilizing hundreds of thousands of troops). Stalin knew nothing about the bombs until they were dropped but FDR certainly made it clear to him throughout the war that US resources were as limitless as the US wished them to be, so he had to assume the worst. Stalin made it clear to FDR that the number and commitment of his troops were as limitless as he wished them to be, so we had to assume the worst as well.
It's not pleasant to think that the bombs were used against the Japanese as a demonstration to the Russians, but that's quite likely to have been the case. The only possible upside to this is that Japan had a much brighter future not being an iron curtain nation.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that they'll deliver it and assemble it in 4-6 weeks, why didn't NASA just hire them for the real thing since they have their own shipping worked out.
Maybe there are benefits to this outsourcing thing after all.
I was thinking that one advantage of a PC scope is that you could project it
Ok, an analog scope, an iSight and a projector. You're still much cheaper and you can project any other thing that you might want.
No. This is Apple's way of telling investors:
There is no way we need $300M to finance ideas that the remaining $4.8 billion can't already handle. If we do need more money, interest rates are near an all time low so we'll just borrow it back or blackmail MSFT again. In the mean time, why pay the interest since it'll have negligible tax effect against earned interest on $4.8B.
More than anything I think it means that Apple doesn't see any investments that are guaranteed winners above 3%. If they already have that kind of war chest at their disposal, does an extra $300 million really get them anything?
Apple and Fred have been clear for some time that the war chest allows them to buy revenues. If Maya was in fact up for sale, Apple should have no problem writing a check for it. Apple can in fact write a check for either ATI or Nvidia if they really wanted to be in that market. They have options and are being judicious in how they use it.
There are a lot of comments here regarding appropriate means of evaluating, etc. I'm involved in developing and deploying assessment tools at a major university. Here's the deal:
1) Evaluations do correlate to grades assigned. Evaluation boosting is a real factor in grade inflation at many universities. It's not imaginary, and has been carefully studied.
2) At most major research universities evaluation usually don't play a significant role in tenure. A strong publication profile will overwhelm a mediocre evaluation profile. Most research universities that I'm familiar with do, however, use these evaluations to try to improve instruction. This is particularly true with non-tenure track instructors.
3) Evaluations really aren't particularly useful in instruction assessment. Studies have shown that students generate rather accurate assessments after only 5 seconds exposure to the instructors teaching style. They're more reflective of personality assessment (so are most job interviews, but that's a different thread) than instruction quality. Developing some kind of standardized system overlooks the fact that the surveys themselves are of limited value.
In spite of good intentions by universities the fact is that end-of-term evaluations just don't tell us anything particularly useful. Regardless of what students think of their instructors, the only really valid instruction assessment is direct measure: test what the students know when they enter the class, test what they know when they leave, see if the difference is what you expect in a semester and correlates closely with what students needed to learn. Indirect measure through surveys is useful, but mostly in trying to dissect what went wrong when the outcomes weren't met. Even then, you generally need direct observation by a 3rd party to identify specific actions to take.
Simply and incompassionately stated, who gives a shit if the guy can speak english provided the students learn what they need. If students don't learn what they need, that's the real issue, and then you walk back to figure out what went wrong. If you learned it, and the guy was a dick, the bottom line was that you learned it. Individually it says almost nothing about instruction and almost everything about the student, but collectively it says something provided that the starting and ending expectations are a reasonable distance apart.
What makes this difficult to implement is that the start and end of term student assessment *can't* be done by the instructor, rather by a 3rd party and then all manner of academic freedom issues crop up not to mention that it's a lot of extra work against strained budgets. BTW, the first programs that you'll see stepping up on this are engineering programs as part of their accreditation efforts.
This, by the way, is what has led us to standardized testing by absurdly overextending the 3rd party beyond that of the school board all the way to the district, then state, then nation. There's simply no value in determining if students aren't meeting outcomes if the assessors are so far removed from instruction that they can't provide meaningful feedback other than to say 'you're leaving students behind', and the people that actually can do something about it locally are so far removed from the assessment that they have no control of the situation.
But the bottom line is that sites such as this provide almost no meaningful feedback. Even sanctioned end-of-term evaluations provide almost no meaningful feedback related to instruction.
California has a bill designed to deal with these situations, though it's not clear if it would apply to this specific situation.
5 1- 1400/sb_1386_bill_20020926_chaptered.html
http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/sen/sb_13
The problem is that the bill is designed for data theft, not for dipshits giving it away for free. Nevertheless, the bill requires that consumers whose data has been stolen be notified through viable means - email, letter, public notice if they can't be identified. Fines to the company for not doing this and the person responsible for the data is open to civil action.
The main problem I see from the article is that the impacted individuals may not be notified, which is just wrong. Granted, this kind of thing probably can't prevented (minimized, yes, stopped, no) but there's a right way to address the problem and a wrong way. At least notify the affected people of what's happened.
Well, in the midwest US, it's not uncommon for hailstones to be golfball size or larger. I witnessed softball sized hail pound the ever-loving shit out of a parking lot full of cars in Denver many years ago. Not just broken windshields, but every upward exposed body panel was dented. Traditional roofs are good at protecting passengers, but are hugely expensive to repair.
What I don't get, though seems to be changing, is the ongoing fascination with painted metal body panels, as if the auto industry made most of it's money out of collision repair, or something. Why not go with solid composite panels? Yeah, you lose that whole 'shiny' thing, but you also give up door dings, scratches, stone nicks, rust, *and* they'll hold up great to hailstones. A big storm will still take out your windows, but that's much harder to prevent and is fortunately much cheaper than body panels. I have a Saturn with metal hood/roof, but plastic door/fender/quarterpanels. The paint still scuffs, but no dents, which is better.
Is the only reason why we persist with painted metal body panels because they're pretty? Structurally, they really don't add much to the car.
And, of course, if you're skittish about the whole click-pause-click thing, you can click and hit enter and it'll edit the name, enter again to exit this mode. If you're really skittish about rename in place, either cmd-I and edit the name in the get info panel, or cmd-opt-I will keep the get info panel up as a floating menu and it'll reflect the current selection. Handy if you've got pixels to burn.
Apple has a solution to this, which has trade-offs, but seems pretty functional.
Essentially, each of their iLife apps is a replacement for the Finder. Do we really need music search integrated with file search? Or is it sufficient to build independent metadata (ID3) and filestructure (playlists) just for music. That's really the brilliance of iTunes in that it never takes you back to your HD filestructure. You can even ask it to maintain the HD filestructure to reflect the metadata structure, so it'll keep everything in an artist/album/song structure, naming things as needed.
iPhoto is set up the same way, but it's pretty apparent that the iPhoto guys are the 'B' team, since they haven't gotten it nearly as slick as iTunes yet, but it also has the equivalent of content metadata, playlists, and smart playlists. So, yes, I can easily find my wedding photos. The trade-off is that you can't search for 'Wedding' in the Finder and get wedding photos, wedding songs, etc. Maybe that's upcoming, but I'm not totally convinced of the value.
The iTunes organizational structure does carry into iPhoto, so if you want to select a song for a slideshow in iPhoto, you can see your iTunes playlists, and filter against metadata. It also carries into iMovie, etc.
Other posters have clearly identified the problems with metadata. File organization is generallly only useful if you are willing to symlink across all of your metadata, otherwise your photos of you mom and your wedding photos are disjoint, since some should be in both places. The single biggest problem with metadata is putting it in to begin with. iPhoto now allows you to do that during photo import - using a slide-show type UI.
I think MSs tendency to do everything in one place is interesting, but tends to not come off so well. Having everything in SQL could eliminate one of the shortcomings in Apple's implementation which is that they need to maintain an XML intermediate structure for music files, photos, etc. While somewhat handy, it's main function is to join file metadata and the FS, which means that it is somewhat fragile.
Yep.
Quite honestly, there's nothing more useful than reserving 2GB on your iPod for an OS X Server install so you can boot your Xserve in an emergency. Xserve even comes with a front-mounted Firewire port specifically for this purpose.
I pretty much have my server emergency kit on me at all times.
The most apparent thing to me when watching Nemo was that the film has heros but no villains. There are some minor adversaries, but no bad-guy.
It's a really sublime film in my opinion.
"Walt was known to "denounce" gays and communists.."
So was Reagan, and we made him President.
Not knowing what your B.S. degree in (assuming you have one, of course, as it's not a requirement for medical school) you should consider graduate study in Biomedical Engineering.
Most certainly you'll have some undergraduate coursework to fill in, but you could go into areas such as biomechanics if you want to get your hands dirty or medical information systems if you want something more on the IT side.
Information systems, medical imaging and image analysis, biosignal analysis and processing, there's a pretty wide range of computational and traditional engineering focus areas that would benefit immensely from your experience.
Biomedical Engineering is still a growth field in this country, particularly in the R&D. Being an M.D. would make you uniquely qualified for clinical research, though that's largely a need outside of the information arena.
If you are interested in this path, talk to some universities that offer degrees and take some of the introductory coursework via satellite programs and get yourself admitted. A M.S. degree will be sufficient to get you into the job market and you can probably pull that off in about 3 years.
Don't forget the Workgroup Servers running AIX.
Apple has done alright here and has extended warranty coverage for iBook owners starting today:
http://www.apple.com/support/ibook/faq/
Not as good as no problems, but I don't think you can expect too much more than this. Can we get back to bitching about 1 button mice now?
I've known a few people that have landed interviews *specifically* because of a listed outside interest. In all cases they were very interesting interests, but when you're looking at a lot of uniformly good resumes, it's worth focusing on interesting people.
I conduct a fair amount of interviews myself and I can't say that there are many tips to win someone like me over. Within 5 seconds of meeting you I'll decide whether or not this is going anywhere. If it starts out on the right note, you have one hour to not screw it up. Nobody recovers from that first impression if it's bad. I know it sounds like bad form, but everytime that I've been overruled on that point (a hire not reporting to me or below me), we're regretted it, and I've never hired a bad person from a good first impression. Not many people win me over in 5 seconds and keep that for an hour.
I don't believe in the greatest strengths/weaknesses stuff. I'll present you with a situation with no clear resolution and ask you to walk me through it. I'll do that half a dozen times and grill you about the decisions you make along the way. People almost always present me with a viable, but different solution, and their strengths and weaknesses are painfully obvious by the choices they make. I'll know if you're a team player, a multitasker, if you overpromise, if you're selfish, and so on. I'll also know if you're a bullshitter, if you know your stuff, etc. You can't possibly prepare for it since I've never asked a question that you've heard before.
Most of the candidates are technically capable of doing the job, so I'm really looking for people that fit into a team, that can be trusted to work unsupervised when that happens, who will grow into responsibility that we know is upcoming, etc. That's really what you can gain from the interview, though few people bother to really look for it. You also shouldn't need to meet with a dozen people to get hired - that's a sure sign that nobody is really in charge.
I'd like to see some statistics on how many people attempt to invade/evade the physical security checks at Netsol's NOC that require and necessitate facilties on that level. The same goes for most any datacenter - your physical security is awesome, but why?
Because some resources are so important that even a single breach can be devastating. It's a tough thing to engineer around. For resources like that, you calculate the cost of failure, identify a reasonable relative cost to invest to prevent that failure, and invest it in anything and everything that will get you there.
Security comes in two forms - that which prevents (active) and that which deters (passive). Passive can be very effective, or so believed most of the world during the cold war.
What's funny is that before Regan, this would have made a dandy GOP ad.
"I think it's important to point out in discussions like this, because they still get turned into David (Apple) vs. Goliath (MS) arguments more often than not. The fact is in terms of music it's at best two Goliaths. Neither of these companies believes in standards, except the ones they set themselves and then expect the rest of the world to follow whether the world likes it or not. "
I wonder why Apple should support WMA on the iPod when MS doesn't support WMA on the Mac? What kind of marketing problem does this create for Apple when Mac users can't play DRM WMA? On the other hand, Windows users can play DRM AAC files thanks to iTunes.
AAC is an open standard. WMA is not. There are no open DRM standards to choose among, as far as I know, so by definition DRM is proprietary, and given what it attempting to accomplish you can understand why opening DRM to a standards body is a bit of an obstacle.
It's interesting how DRM WMA provides users more choice, unless you have a Mac, and then you're fucked.
"All I am trying to say is that Apple, in general, has fewer devices and programs that can run on it. It seems like nearly all the hardware you can use on an Apple is sold by Apple themselves."
Uh, no. It only seems that way because oftentimes Apple's hardware is better than everybody elses, so Mac users buy it. Seriously, I *own* more non-Apple hardware than Apple makes. USB floppy drive, firewire HD, digital camera, printers, monitors, mice, keyboards, firewire burner, scanner, bar code scanner, remote controls, even multi-function devices.
The last time I explicity looked for Mac support was on a multifunction laser printer about 5 years ago.
Don't forget Rendezvous discovery from Safari to Apache on your subnet so that even if you're on a dynamic IP, everybody can still bookmark your site.
I never quite understood the value of that feature until I walked into a conference room and used that feature.
Unfortunately, most tech scholarships are awarded by the universities themselves, so a school getting itself off the ground won't have much to work with yet.
The reason is that engineering/CS are notorious for their high attrition rates, and money given to entering students often goes to future business and psychology majors. Corporations do give quite a bit of merit money, but it goes straight to the engineering/CS schools who are typically quite experienced at identifying who are good candidates and who are not.
It's important to talk to the specific programs that you are interested, not to the larger campus since the scholarships are often tied to specific programs or to engineering as a whole. These scholarships are often offers, rather than applications, but you can certainly get your name in there.
Don't overlook working through school, tech majors often have access to some pretty well paying jobs - look at on-campus student tech support positions and off-campus internships and co-ops. You probably won't be able to work as must as some non-tech students because of your study load, but college loans are a very worthwhile investment and are readily available.
PalmOS was founded by former Apple employees, so this makes a lot of sense.
Apple's greatest contribution may not be it's spin on the UI or 3.5" floppies or mice or whatever, but the degree to which former Apple employees have taken lessons learned at Apple and applied them to so many new products and technologies over the last 20 years or so. So many successful startups were founded by former Apple employees.
It works in reverse as well.
When Coke was doing their blind product testing for New Coke, people liked the new recipe and Coke thought they were onto something. But a lot of people liked the original Coke because of those impressions - it reminded them of their first kiss, or going somewhere with their parents, etc.
When the formula changed, some people lost their connection to those impressions and declared that they didn't like the new formula - even if they picked it as a preference in a blind test. The problem was that Coke asked the wrong question in their assessment. They asked 'Which tastes better', rather than 'Which would you buy'. Coke is the product that empirically tastes worse, but people would prefer to buy. It's a catch-22 for Coke, since they crafted those impressions in the first place and are now have to live with them. If it was a ploy to switch from sugar to other sweeteners, then it backfired horribly.
If you think really hard, most people can identify some impressions such as this. My son will probably always associate Egg McMuffins with spending time with his father since that's a little habit we have (McD's is across the street from my house so we walk there for breakfast). I associate Dennys with going skiiing with my family, and so on.
Without question, the best bag I've ever used is a Waterfield Designs bag: http://www.sfbags.com/
There's nary a stitch out of place in 2 years of daily use. Yes, that buckle is an airline seat belt buckle. It's a very over-engineered bag. They sit very tight to the body. Many bags are balanced poorly and hang away from the body, but these hold to your body and don't sway when you walk.
They come in a range of sizes, have laptop sleeves that fit nicely with the bag, and accessory bags, iPod sleeves, etc. Check them out.
Well, there was never going to be an invasion of Japan. Japan began suggesting surrender as early as Feb 1945 - the main sticking point later in the negotiations being that we wanted something unconditional whereas the Japanese were insisting that the Emperor retain a non-political title.
The bombs did force an unconditional surrender, but more importantly, it stopped Stalin dead in his tracks, who we had recognized as a grave threat who was now moving aggressively toward Japan. The worst-case scenario here was that Stalin, weakened but holding far more control of Europe and Asia than he could have hoped, could move for a year-round port city on the Pacific. He was clearly willing to commit his citizens to the last man - his ability to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers, including women to their deaths scared the hell out of the other ally leaders. Stalin could move against Japan from the north and take territory from Japan that would be extremely valuable to Russia against a US enemy (Russia entered the war against Japan on Aug 8 by easily invading Manchuria). Stalin realized that the US was the only other power to escape WWII with any resources, and that the two would be in conflict.
Stalins best scenario was to move against Japan after a successful US invasion - both US and Japanese forces would be weak and the US would not be prepared for an invasion from the north. Russia could more easily bring forces to the location than the US, and Russia could win most or all of the island. Stalin realized that the US would buckle under the scale of the Russian army, particularly since the US public would oppose defending real estate given that the real enemy (Japan) was defeated.
The US position was difficult. We couldn't afford to invade given that scenario - Japan could be lost to Russia regardless of whether we defeated Japan or not. Quite possibly the bombs were viewed as the solution to both problems - first, we could quickly end the war with Japan without giving Russia time to become entrenched, and avoiding any further invasions. Second, we send a message to Stalin that we can defeat his armies without committing US soldiers, and that we can bring resources to bear much more quickly than he can (how long does it take to hopscotch a B-29 across the Pacific vs. mobilizing hundreds of thousands of troops). Stalin knew nothing about the bombs until they were dropped but FDR certainly made it clear to him throughout the war that US resources were as limitless as the US wished them to be, so he had to assume the worst. Stalin made it clear to FDR that the number and commitment of his troops were as limitless as he wished them to be, so we had to assume the worst as well.
It's not pleasant to think that the bombs were used against the Japanese as a demonstration to the Russians, but that's quite likely to have been the case. The only possible upside to this is that Japan had a much brighter future not being an iron curtain nation.