Hopefully this game will be released right at the end of June. By then, all the schools should be out and no more homework (except for bandcamps and the usual summer work for AP classes or debate camp).
My old roomate (now in med school) used to play Starcraft 24/7 when it first came out and he nearly missed a final exam. Ahhhh... the good old days. Sure wish we could go back to those golden years of the net when bandwidth were plenty and users were lacking:-)
I hear ya man. Pretty crazy when you're 15 you are getting slashdotted, while those of us who aren't 15 anymore are reading about those who are getting slashdotted.
Anyone has a cool pyramid scheme for getting slashdotted?:-)
Well, with this little gizmo, all the unabombers will head into the woods with their hand powered cell phones and a few of these little bad boys and they will be up and running...
Perhaps an unlikely story, but perhaps someone who is misguided and also has a lot of time on their hands can perhaps spend all day charging these things up....
Cool concept for those who like to camp in the woods but don't want to leave the luxury of a cell phone behind... if they can only find a cell tower now.:-/
Actually, I haven't looked yet, but I wonder if i can get a copy of this book called Engineering Economics. It was used for a class named the same as the title of the book while I was at Va Tech for engineering. Looking back, I wish I didn't sell that book, cuz it had some really interesting examples for figuring out the price of inflation and some otherwise, truly interesting math that most normal people would not ever use. Nonetheless, ahhh... the weird memories of Engineering Economics.
Anyone out there taken a similar class to this at the other engineering or liberal arts or business schools?
My current system that I run at home is between a 450 and a 233. Though this does not include the two system that I have both running dual 533. Considering where I was before, upgrading from an overdriven 486/pentium 83mhz to the current 450, that is a 542 percent increase in the clock rate. Ironically though, I aleady had 128MB in my old 83mhz and even my 450 only has 128mb... quite sad.
The only justification that I will see in getting a new computer anytime soon is when I see some 3GHZ machines. (That is again about a 550 percent increase in clock rate).
At the rate new chip designs are coming out, I think I will have more chips to choose from than underwear. I can keep waiting.:-)
Re:we did this at my high school my first two year
on
Games in High School?
·
· Score: 1
if we have more of this around the schools we would see a much better graduating class.:-)
There was a recent book that was released that discussed the decline in social capital. It discussed the decline in community bowling league, the lack of and continuing decline in church attendance. Over all, this generation, i.e. the generation X is becoming less tied to one another than any other previous generation. Clubs and leagues that was once known from the past generations is now almost gone to the way side.
However, having a computer club where kids can gather to share ides, play games, similar to those that spawn team work and fair play, in a control environment, it really is no different than the same values and ideas once shared by the chess club, weekly league bowling, or even the boy scouts. I believe it is a great way to build a sense of community, and provide a great way for individuals whom once may have felt a sense of outcast, now they may join others and come together for a sense of togetherness.
Bottom line, whatever game it may be, mech warrior, starcraft, sims, quake, or unreal, it is still the individual themselves that will make the right decision as to how to play the game. After all it is only a game until someone take it too far.
No one ever said you have to bet money in order to play a game of pool. The same could be said about the games such as Doom and Quake. It is only a game. And in a supervised environment, such as a computer club or a games club in a school and academic setting, perhaps the incident at columbine could have been avoided. For it was their sense of being outcasted from the rest of their peers that in the end drove them to that unfortunate fate. I believe had they been in an evironment where they could have felt a sense of belonging, things would have been different.
I say we should have all have a gaming club at each school!:-) "Games, it's not just for boys anymore!!!"
I had the chance to talk to an individual that works very closely to the ASP.net team at MS and the scoop that this individual told me was that in a few months, MS will be releasing a light weight and open sourced version of the Visual Studio.net IDE. If anyone has seen the SDK, it actually installs like the previous versions of Visual Studio, minus the the GUI. It has the compiler, but just no pretty gui. I don't know how reliable the source of the information is, but if anyone has seen the ASP.net Uneleashed book, this person wrote the foreword....
if this will happen... who knows... we'll have to see
This doesn't come as a shock for those 'senior' citizens who never looked at their bill that was once an AT&T customer.
AT&T used to bill senior citizens, and still do in some part of the country, for renting out their 'touch-tone' phones. Not that I am trying to bash on senior citizens or anything, but many individuals who never looked at their bills for years and knew their rates were remaining fairly constant never knew that they were being billed for a phone that they had in their home that was actually installed and owned by AT&T.
There was a news report done on this where an individual took care of his mom and when he started to do her bills, he had noticed that she was getting charged for having an 'AT&T' phone. The funny thng is when he found ou that for years his mom was paying for the rental of the phone, he rushed right out to the nearest store and bought her a simple $9.99 phone with big buttons (so she could see). Called AT&T and told them to remove the phone.
This may not be the oldest form of AT&T milking their customers, but it certainly is one of the most interesting ones that I have heard. Fleecing of America (especially our senior citizens). *sigh*
When a powerful company such as Sony feels that a grass root movement will cut into their profit, they automatically take legal actions against them. Yet in the same token, because they are all-so powerful, they can just turn the other cheek and for those who has suffered from the legal battles, now they are asked to come back and help them to raise interests in a product that they originally were discouraged from using?
I think this could be described by the lyrics of Naughty by Nature: Everything gonna be alright:
Drop that, and now you want me to rap and give?
Say somethin' positive? Well positive isn't where I lived
I say eat this Sony! I'd like to see some form of apology!!!
Creative Technology Acquries 3DLabs (2)
on
The Age of Nvidia
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly enough, guess who is doing the propsals and design work for OpenGL 2.0? 3DLabs!
Creative Technology Acquires 3DLabs. Watch out!
on
The Age of Nvidia
·
· Score: 1
Interesting side note, Creative Technologies (makers of SoundBlaster) acquired 3DLabs for $37 million cash and $6.3 million in stock. Press release can be found here.
Yeah, I hear ya man... that permedia card was cool... it was great for standard opengl stuff and anytime i ran any winamp 3d plugin that used real opengl it was rocking. the same plugins looked horrible when i plugged in my tnt2 card and even after updating the drivers it still blew horrible chunks.... eventually i'll have a box that i will resurrect my permedia out of its plastic static baggy tomb:-) for now though, i'm stuck with my tnt2 and quake:P
Hehehe, someone mentioned permedia... which of course was produced by 3dlabs. yeah... 3dlabs...
3Dlabs in my opinion was and is still probablly in the same boat as IBM was when it was trying to market their MCA bus technology over PCI. I remember when I got my gateway back in 99 and it came with a permedia2.... man, that was smoking with cool opengl. but it was never great with quake2 due to its problems with drivers. comparable to my current tnt2 (outdated as well) it outperforms, though with my 450, it's barely pushing the limits...but it's still fun to play.
none the less, 3dlabs had the great cards, but man they sure are pricey... but they were one of the first to support opengl 1.2 in hardware and not to mention with their better drivers for their much, much higher end cards... didn't seem like they paid too much attention to their lower end customers...people like me who had their permedia2... *sigh*
did i mention they were also the first to put 128MB of SDRAM on their video cards? (only available for highend workstations...)
07: The chicks down the hall really dig guys that have a GeForce7 video card.
06: Frat parties beat going to happy hours.
05: College is the only where you will find geeky chicks.
04: Homework is so much cooler than complicated deadlines and moving targets set by demanding managers and supervisors.
03: You don't want to deal with end-users.
02: The food on campus rocks!
01: In case you change your mind about being a systems administrator, a piece of paper saying that you put up 4 years of hell is a great way to get into another job where you might not have any experience at all like being a paper boy.:-)
Bottom line: College is alright. Take some classes at a community college and then transfer to a decent school and work while you're going to school where you can learn the in's and outs of a system administrator. At least you'll have a degree and that's something to fall back on even if you want a total career change.
In some companies, system administrators are also called bitches and they make you call them daddy.
If you think the toys are crap, wait until you see this to be released. I sure hope it will be kick ass like the first Fortress Maximus that was released.
A couple of years ago, beowulf clusters was made from a bunch of 'relatively' cheap ALPHAs. I wonder if there will be a new breed of beowulf clusters, made from a bunch a REALLY cheap Sam Walton branded PCs?:-)
Can you imagine a rack full of PCs with the sticker "Sam's Choice" on them all? LOL
Just thought that I'd give you all a chuckle....:-)
I think the only times I called for tech support is to attempt to get RMAs. Except for one time when I called IBM because my old Valuepoint DX-2/66 was being upgraded to an overdrive 83 and that their mother board needed an 'interposer' chip that went between the motherboard and the actual board itself. The technician knew exactly right away when I mentioned my Valuepoint 66 and an overdrive chip and told me that he would ship the interposer chip out right away. I spent more time waiting in the queue than talking with him. The interposer chip came within 3 days. Talk about fast!:-) But this was like in 1997, aka the glory days of tech support.
Hahahahaa:-) For those that don't know, it's actually an inside joke.
Back in December I was let go from a company formerly owned by TFSM and I was personally in charge of System Integration for a VOD or what we called "POD" system for Verizon Avenue.
We were deployed in two sites here in the Metro D.C. area and for 8 months of my life I gave my all to this project only to have it shattered to pieces to the poor handling of upper management.
Aside from just providing middleware, we also had a rock solid back office suite that contained everything from targeted advertising (world class Connect system - props to the dev team!), and everything related to CRM. Yet with a solid product, we were still going under. (TLC anyone?)
To my knowledge to date, I have not seen any other system that could come close to what our system could do. Granted it still has many issues to resolve, but for a completely digital system end-to-end, from content management, license management, provider payment, contract management, and to customer retention management, there isn't anything out there can do what we had. But hey, just because we had the best doesn't mean we can stay afloat.
Firewall in the NIC? Well, 3Com a year ago was already selling wall-plate switches that you can install in the wall. The retail price for these things are like around 140 bucks, but I got a brochure in the mail from 3Com that was offering them at 50 bucks a pop. Check the link below:
It's a pretty neat idea to use a single drop from your wiring closet out to each cubicle. Unfortunately, I would still need about 3 or 4 of these jacks since I had 12 or so servers and workstations all cancer-clustering around me.
I for one will speak out on this subject. Though I do not posses the hours and hours of experience for programming since my experience has been mostly in dealing with systems integration and tryhing to bridge the gap of delivered software vs. expected software. But recently, I have been more involved with development and that there is a special joy that people enjoy that come with development, at least I know that I can say for myself and from the posts that I have read, many others feel the same way: which is that when you're done, you can look back and say 'wow, I did that!' and feel proud that you were able to take a problem and be able to solve it. It is a sense of accomplishment that I know that I enjoy even if it's trying to dig through mountains and mountains of oracle documentation trying to load a very poorly designed database that has nested tables that would even make any LISP programmer die, that at the end of day, when you are finally getting it to work, you can be proud that you were the one who did that. And the best part is that you get to wear jeans and t-shirt... though at my current position, i'm forced to wear khakis.... (I actually had to buy new clothes when I started my new job).
Now on to management.
I can tell you from my last job that management is something that is something to speak for. Yet, at the same time, if taken lightly you can easily make an a*s of yourself. For example, I cam from a dotcom and unlike most companies that was in the area, our management was actually quite well in hind-sight. (I am talking about middle management and not upper management. I'll discuss them later.) All the managers that were in charge of development really knew their stuff. They could have easily put down the books and pulled up their sleeves and got down with vi and coded up some seriously tight code. But they had a more important task to handle, which was to be able to lead a group of developers to do the one thing that is the most important in any development team: COMMUNICATION!!!!!!!
But there wasn't meetings everyday, but from my cubicle mate who was a developer, their usual rate of meetings was maybe once every two or three weeks. But on and off, his manager would come and talk with him about what he's working on, and look at his code and help him out on where he could optimize and perhaps looking at the algorithm differently and just different things. And for the most part, many of our development managers were all developers at one point, but they were not just 'managing' but they were teaching those of us and mentoring us who were fresh out of college and still learning the ropes of the trade. And to them, I feel that they were truly the great ones in our company and provide not just leadership but also gave us something that we could take home. (yeah, i know, it sounds corny but it's true... lol)
Now, as far as upper management is concerned, they were pretty much all crap. At the end of the day, they were only concerned with lining their pockets with money that was made on the back of the developers... hahaha! Bastards...:-) I can say that is because many of us were laid off due to someone's greed that pushed the company to its brink of death. This could have been avoided if he did not attempt to 'swindle' his way to potential investors.
TFSM: wow, what can I say here. Hmmm.... well I'm glad that I didn't sign the non-disclosure, non-competing confidentiality agreement!!!!! LOL! Two weeks pay is not worth my soul. Take that TFSM!
So... what do u have to learn from if you actually read all this? Not all management is bad. I wish that me and my several now ex-patriates did not have to part our separate ways and that in much restrospect, I do miss the work, but most importantly, I miss the atmosphere, and I miss the poeple the most. It is truly sad that the temptation of money can drive men to do evil and selfish deeds that could be otherwise easily avoided. But we all will grow, and live on and of course life goes on, and I have a new job, and now I am trying to bring those expatriates on as well:-)
During the good old days of networking when I was at Virginia Tech, they had a pretty interesting setup. As far as I understood, VT used to sit on a NAP on the I2. The closer you were to the NAP, the fatter your pipe. There were some plans to open the NAP up for local residental access since most of the Blacksburg residents were students and faculty. I don't know if that was ever accomplished or not.
Anyways, before digressing, VT's outgoing pipe had two logical interface. Any packets bound to universites or other educational institutions that had access to the I2 via their local NAP points, would go through the then established oc-3. (The pipe might be fatter now). Any other packets that were bound for networks outside of these destinations were forwarded through the dual t-3 that was used for 'all other traffic'.
I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.
I believe other schools share the same network setup as VT and i wouldn't be surprised many of those once old pipes have now been upgraded to fatter ones. Then again, MCI does have a lot of dark fiber laid around the AMTRAK rails that has yet lit up.
However, despite with all this nice connection, I was recently told by several Virginia Tech on-campus residents that their connection has been capped up. I did some digging around and I believe that CNS is now capping the wall connections with the use of the catalyst 6500 catalysts from Cisco which I belive can limit network usage from reading all their marketing material... lol:-)
Bottom line: Even if your organization or institutions had fat pipes to external networks, if your network capacity is limited from the point where you plug in your RJ45... don't expect to see blazing speeds).
BTW, as far as I know, they got the ports to the residents dorms set up to 10mpbs half duplex... ewwwww......:-/
Slashdot Mirror
Hopefully this game will be released right at the end of June. By then, all the schools should be out and no more homework (except for bandcamps and the usual summer work for AP classes or debate camp).
:-)
My old roomate (now in med school) used to play Starcraft 24/7 when it first came out and he nearly missed a final exam. Ahhhh... the good old days. Sure wish we could go back to those golden years of the net when bandwidth were plenty and users were lacking
I hear ya man. Pretty crazy when you're 15 you are getting slashdotted, while those of us who aren't 15 anymore are reading about those who are getting slashdotted.
:-)
Anyone has a cool pyramid scheme for getting slashdotted?
I guess people take the name 'gnu' for granted. The 'real' GNU/Linux is Debian. But it's just a name, and a name for a distribution.
Well, with this little gizmo, all the unabombers will head into the woods with their hand powered cell phones and a few of these little bad boys and they will be up and running...
:-/
Perhaps an unlikely story, but perhaps someone who is misguided and also has a lot of time on their hands can perhaps spend all day charging these things up....
Cool concept for those who like to camp in the woods but don't want to leave the luxury of a cell phone behind... if they can only find a cell tower now.
Actually, I haven't looked yet, but I wonder if i can get a copy of this book called Engineering Economics. It was used for a class named the same as the title of the book while I was at Va Tech for engineering. Looking back, I wish I didn't sell that book, cuz it had some really interesting examples for figuring out the price of inflation and some otherwise, truly interesting math that most normal people would not ever use. Nonetheless, ahhh... the weird memories of Engineering Economics.
Anyone out there taken a similar class to this at the other engineering or liberal arts or business schools?
My current system that I run at home is between a 450 and a 233. Though this does not include the two system that I have both running dual 533. Considering where I was before, upgrading from an overdriven 486/pentium 83mhz to the current 450, that is a 542 percent increase in the clock rate. Ironically though, I aleady had 128MB in my old 83mhz and even my 450 only has 128mb... quite sad.
:-)
The only justification that I will see in getting a new computer anytime soon is when I see some 3GHZ machines. (That is again about a 550 percent increase in clock rate).
At the rate new chip designs are coming out, I think I will have more chips to choose from than underwear. I can keep waiting.
if we have more of this around the schools we would see a much better graduating class. :-)
keep up the good work!
There was a recent book that was released that discussed the decline in social capital. It discussed the decline in community bowling league, the lack of and continuing decline in church attendance. Over all, this generation, i.e. the generation X is becoming less tied to one another than any other previous generation. Clubs and leagues that was once known from the past generations is now almost gone to the way side.
:-) "Games, it's not just for boys anymore!!!"
However, having a computer club where kids can gather to share ides, play games, similar to those that spawn team work and fair play, in a control environment, it really is no different than the same values and ideas once shared by the chess club, weekly league bowling, or even the boy scouts. I believe it is a great way to build a sense of community, and provide a great way for individuals whom once may have felt a sense of outcast, now they may join others and come together for a sense of togetherness.
Bottom line, whatever game it may be, mech warrior, starcraft, sims, quake, or unreal, it is still the individual themselves that will make the right decision as to how to play the game. After all it is only a game until someone take it too far.
No one ever said you have to bet money in order to play a game of pool. The same could be said about the games such as Doom and Quake. It is only a game. And in a supervised environment, such as a computer club or a games club in a school and academic setting, perhaps the incident at columbine could have been avoided. For it was their sense of being outcasted from the rest of their peers that in the end drove them to that unfortunate fate. I believe had they been in an evironment where they could have felt a sense of belonging, things would have been different.
I say we should have all have a gaming club at each school!
I had the chance to talk to an individual that works very closely to the ASP.net team at MS and the scoop that this individual told me was that in a few months, MS will be releasing a light weight and open sourced version of the Visual Studio .net IDE. If anyone has seen the SDK, it actually installs like the previous versions of Visual Studio, minus the the GUI. It has the compiler, but just no pretty gui. I don't know how reliable the source of the information is, but if anyone has seen the ASP.net Uneleashed book, this person wrote the foreword....
if this will happen... who knows... we'll have to see
This doesn't come as a shock for those 'senior' citizens who never looked at their bill that was once an AT&T customer.
AT&T used to bill senior citizens, and still do in some part of the country, for renting out their 'touch-tone' phones. Not that I am trying to bash on senior citizens or anything, but many individuals who never looked at their bills for years and knew their rates were remaining fairly constant never knew that they were being billed for a phone that they had in their home that was actually installed and owned by AT&T.
There was a news report done on this where an individual took care of his mom and when he started to do her bills, he had noticed that she was getting charged for having an 'AT&T' phone. The funny thng is when he found ou that for years his mom was paying for the rental of the phone, he rushed right out to the nearest store and bought her a simple $9.99 phone with big buttons (so she could see). Called AT&T and told them to remove the phone.
This may not be the oldest form of AT&T milking their customers, but it certainly is one of the most interesting ones that I have heard. Fleecing of America (especially our senior citizens). *sigh*
When a powerful company such as Sony feels that a grass root movement will cut into their profit, they automatically take legal actions against them. Yet in the same token, because they are all-so powerful, they can just turn the other cheek and for those who has suffered from the legal battles, now they are asked to come back and help them to raise interests in a product that they originally were discouraged from using?
I think this could be described by the lyrics of Naughty by Nature: Everything gonna be alright:
Drop that, and now you want me to rap and give?
Say somethin' positive? Well positive isn't where I lived
I say eat this Sony! I'd like to see some form of apology!!!
Lunar Embassy
Interestingly enough, guess who is doing the propsals and design work for OpenGL 2.0? 3DLabs!
Interesting side note, Creative Technologies (makers of SoundBlaster) acquired 3DLabs for $37 million cash and $6.3 million in stock. Press release can be found here.
Yeah, I hear ya man... that permedia card was cool... it was great for standard opengl stuff and anytime i ran any winamp 3d plugin that used real opengl it was rocking. the same plugins looked horrible when i plugged in my tnt2 card and even after updating the drivers it still blew horrible chunks.... eventually i'll have a box that i will resurrect my permedia out of its plastic static baggy tomb :-) for now though, i'm stuck with my tnt2 and quake :P
Hehehe, someone mentioned permedia... which of course was produced by 3dlabs. yeah... 3dlabs...
3Dlabs in my opinion was and is still probablly in the same boat as IBM was when it was trying to market their MCA bus technology over PCI. I remember when I got my gateway back in 99 and it came with a permedia2.... man, that was smoking with cool opengl. but it was never great with quake2 due to its problems with drivers. comparable to my current tnt2 (outdated as well) it outperforms, though with my 450, it's barely pushing the limits...but it's still fun to play.
none the less, 3dlabs had the great cards, but man they sure are pricey... but they were one of the first to support opengl 1.2 in hardware and not to mention with their better drivers for their much, much higher end cards... didn't seem like they paid too much attention to their lower end customers...people like me who had their permedia2... *sigh*
did i mention they were also the first to put 128MB of SDRAM on their video cards? (only available for highend workstations...)
10: You want to owe the government lots of money.
:-)
09: Everyone is doing it.
08: Your roomate will scar you for life.
07: The chicks down the hall really dig guys that have a GeForce7 video card.
06: Frat parties beat going to happy hours.
05: College is the only where you will find geeky chicks.
04: Homework is so much cooler than complicated deadlines and moving targets set by demanding managers and supervisors.
03: You don't want to deal with end-users.
02: The food on campus rocks!
01: In case you change your mind about being a systems administrator, a piece of paper saying that you put up 4 years of hell is a great way to get into another job where you might not have any experience at all like being a paper boy.
Bottom line: College is alright. Take some classes at a community college and then transfer to a decent school and work while you're going to school where you can learn the in's and outs of a system administrator. At least you'll have a degree and that's something to fall back on even if you want a total career change.
In some companies, system administrators are also called bitches and they make you call them daddy.
Fortress Maximus Photos.
Fortree Maximus
A couple of years ago, beowulf clusters was made from a bunch of 'relatively' cheap ALPHAs. I wonder if there will be a new breed of beowulf clusters, made from a bunch a REALLY cheap Sam Walton branded PCs? :-)
:-)
Can you imagine a rack full of PCs with the sticker "Sam's Choice" on them all? LOL
Just thought that I'd give you all a chuckle....
I think the only times I called for tech support is to attempt to get RMAs. Except for one time when I called IBM because my old Valuepoint DX-2/66 was being upgraded to an overdrive 83 and that their mother board needed an 'interposer' chip that went between the motherboard and the actual board itself. The technician knew exactly right away when I mentioned my Valuepoint 66 and an overdrive chip and told me that he would ship the interposer chip out right away. I spent more time waiting in the queue than talking with him. The interposer chip came within 3 days. Talk about fast! :-) But this was like in 1997, aka the glory days of tech support.
Hahahahaa :-) For those that don't know, it's actually an inside joke.
:-)
Back in December I was let go from a company formerly owned by TFSM and I was personally in charge of System Integration for a VOD or what we called "POD" system for Verizon Avenue.
We were deployed in two sites here in the Metro D.C. area and for 8 months of my life I gave my all to this project only to have it shattered to pieces to the poor handling of upper management.
Aside from just providing middleware, we also had a rock solid back office suite that contained everything from targeted advertising (world class Connect system - props to the dev team!), and everything related to CRM. Yet with a solid product, we were still going under. (TLC anyone?)
To my knowledge to date, I have not seen any other system that could come close to what our system could do. Granted it still has many issues to resolve, but for a completely digital system end-to-end, from content management, license management, provider payment, contract management, and to customer retention management, there isn't anything out there can do what we had. But hey, just because we had the best doesn't mean we can stay afloat.
Can we say that I am bitter?
This market is red hot? Red hot my a*s.
3Com's Switch in the Wall
It's a pretty neat idea to use a single drop from your wiring closet out to each cubicle. Unfortunately, I would still need about 3 or 4 of these jacks since I had 12 or so servers and workstations all cancer-clustering around me.
Well...
:-) I can say that is because many of us were laid off due to someone's greed that pushed the company to its brink of death. This could have been avoided if he did not attempt to 'swindle' his way to potential investors.
:-)
I for one will speak out on this subject. Though I do not posses the hours and hours of experience for programming since my experience has been mostly in dealing with systems integration and tryhing to bridge the gap of delivered software vs. expected software. But recently, I have been more involved with development and that there is a special joy that people enjoy that come with development, at least I know that I can say for myself and from the posts that I have read, many others feel the same way: which is that when you're done, you can look back and say 'wow, I did that!' and feel proud that you were able to take a problem and be able to solve it. It is a sense of accomplishment that I know that I enjoy even if it's trying to dig through mountains and mountains of oracle documentation trying to load a very poorly designed database that has nested tables that would even make any LISP programmer die, that at the end of day, when you are finally getting it to work, you can be proud that you were the one who did that. And the best part is that you get to wear jeans and t-shirt... though at my current position, i'm forced to wear khakis.... (I actually had to buy new clothes when I started my new job).
Now on to management.
I can tell you from my last job that management is something that is something to speak for. Yet, at the same time, if taken lightly you can easily make an a*s of yourself. For example, I cam from a dotcom and unlike most companies that was in the area, our management was actually quite well in hind-sight. (I am talking about middle management and not upper management. I'll discuss them later.) All the managers that were in charge of development really knew their stuff. They could have easily put down the books and pulled up their sleeves and got down with vi and coded up some seriously tight code. But they had a more important task to handle, which was to be able to lead a group of developers to do the one thing that is the most important in any development team: COMMUNICATION!!!!!!!
But there wasn't meetings everyday, but from my cubicle mate who was a developer, their usual rate of meetings was maybe once every two or three weeks. But on and off, his manager would come and talk with him about what he's working on, and look at his code and help him out on where he could optimize and perhaps looking at the algorithm differently and just different things. And for the most part, many of our development managers were all developers at one point, but they were not just 'managing' but they were teaching those of us and mentoring us who were fresh out of college and still learning the ropes of the trade. And to them, I feel that they were truly the great ones in our company and provide not just leadership but also gave us something that we could take home. (yeah, i know, it sounds corny but it's true... lol)
Now, as far as upper management is concerned, they were pretty much all crap. At the end of the day, they were only concerned with lining their pockets with money that was made on the back of the developers... hahaha! Bastards...
TFSM: wow, what can I say here. Hmmm.... well I'm glad that I didn't sign the non-disclosure, non-competing confidentiality agreement!!!!! LOL! Two weeks pay is not worth my soul. Take that TFSM!
So... what do u have to learn from if you actually read all this? Not all management is bad. I wish that me and my several now ex-patriates did not have to part our separate ways and that in much restrospect, I do miss the work, but most importantly, I miss the atmosphere, and I miss the poeple the most. It is truly sad that the temptation of money can drive men to do evil and selfish deeds that could be otherwise easily avoided. But we all will grow, and live on and of course life goes on, and I have a new job, and now I am trying to bring those expatriates on as well
During the good old days of networking when I was at Virginia Tech, they had a pretty interesting setup. As far as I understood, VT used to sit on a NAP on the I2. The closer you were to the NAP, the fatter your pipe. There were some plans to open the NAP up for local residental access since most of the Blacksburg residents were students and faculty. I don't know if that was ever accomplished or not.
:-)
:-/
Anyways, before digressing, VT's outgoing pipe had two logical interface. Any packets bound to universites or other educational institutions that had access to the I2 via their local NAP points, would go through the then established oc-3. (The pipe might be fatter now). Any other packets that were bound for networks outside of these destinations were forwarded through the dual t-3 that was used for 'all other traffic'.
I onced did a traceroute to www.ucla.edu from a computer lab on campus during the middle of the day during the middle of the week and got amazing results. I found that there was only 8 hops between that desktop and the webserver that was in CA somewhere and all ping responses were less than 10ms. Talk about insane.
I believe other schools share the same network setup as VT and i wouldn't be surprised many of those once old pipes have now been upgraded to fatter ones. Then again, MCI does have a lot of dark fiber laid around the AMTRAK rails that has yet lit up.
However, despite with all this nice connection, I was recently told by several Virginia Tech on-campus residents that their connection has been capped up. I did some digging around and I believe that CNS is now capping the wall connections with the use of the catalyst 6500 catalysts from Cisco which I belive can limit network usage from reading all their marketing material... lol
Bottom line: Even if your organization or institutions had fat pipes to external networks, if your network capacity is limited from the point where you plug in your RJ45... don't expect to see blazing speeds).
BTW, as far as I know, they got the ports to the residents dorms set up to 10mpbs half duplex... ewwwww......