Good advice but some of it is a little overthought.
If you are the guys then when y'all are going to lunch someone says, "Hey, we're going to lunch. Want to go?" If you end up with a sexual harrassment suit against multiple guys over lunch then you probably deserve it.
If you are the gal then when you see the "gang" heading to lunch just say, "Hey. Are y'all going to lunch? Mind if I join?" Now this is important. When you are at lunch don't feel that you have to fill in any silences. Not unless you are genuinely curious about something. The IT groups I hang out with don't talk to hear themselves and if you do that's a very good way to get lunch organized and gone to right before you get out of that meeting your in. Also be aware that just talking to geeks will convince some of them that you would go out with them. If they ask you out and you don't want to go don't crush our... their pathetic little egos too hard.
And a final thought for the folks that haven't had to take Managing Within the Law. Sexual harrassment is a pattern. The victim must bring up the issue to management. Management is required to investigate. A sexual harrassment lawsuit can only occur (ok. Anyone can bring one but it won't be won without...) if management allowed the situation to continue once it was brought to their attention or the situation was so blatent that a reasonable person would have felt the workplace itself was harrassing and management should have been aware of the situation.
My wife is a doctor and a member of the AMA. They aren't a union. You pay dues, they lobby (very effectively) for the industry, but they don't set wages.
Sign me up for all the organizations you want that promote computer science and IT (as opposed to IS who can all go rot in hell for all I care). I won't join a union that lets people that have read Programming For Dummies compete for the jobs I do. (Not that bosses don't hire those people anyway but I don't want it contractually obligated.)
My uninformed, union-uneducated, closely held opinion,
-CZ
Have them write like they speak. My writing got much better when I realized that I didn't have to fluff up the written text. You *can* fluff it up if that's what your audience expects but at least you'll have a starting point if you have what you would have said written down.
Let's see... was it a Dr. Who episode that pointed this out? Maybe it was someone on slashdot.
I create a very intense magnetic field... (We'll ignore that neutron stars and/or other collapsed goodness also creates intense magnetic fields and those aren't popping around like pinballs.) I create a very intense magnetic field which as everyone knows is electro/magnetic and is propogated at best at the speed of light.
I turn off my intense magnetic field or heck, for that matter I turn it on. At some point the field doesn't become strong enough to pop me into this FTL dimension or it will be strong enough in a tiny bit of time but not *now* because of that light speed propogation. At the interface between strong-enough and not strong enough I am going to see *extremely* odd effects like, oh I don't know... "Hey, how come my body is over here but the bleeding stump of my leg is over there?"
Now, I'd love to learn that once again I had not studied hard enough in my physics classes (or don't recall the Dr. Who episode correctly) but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
IS - Information Services/Systems - tend to deal with business applications (development, vetting, purchasing, etc. Proportion of each role being dependent from what I've seen on size of business. If you don't do in-house app development then that aspect doesn't apply to you), business systems (ordering, ERP, payroll), and management of the aspect of the business tied in with computing as a tool to forward the companies business goals.
IT - Information Technology - deals with the physical aspects of computing. Hardware, networks, disks, etc. This is where you tend to find sysadmin, network admin, and those folks that make sure the blinky lights can blink.
Facilities deals with the the physical space and items like power and cooling.
YMMV of course. If you are a one person shop you're going to be doing most of the above (note in your case though how the lack of management authority divorces you from the aspect of computing tied into achieving business goals).
Now, speaking as someone that's done sysadmining, software development, and management I think your view is off. You are trying to do the technical work and not tie it back into how the company makes money. That's fine if that's what you want to concentrate on but don't pretend there are no other aspects to using computers as a business tool. Also if that's the area (technical) you wish to stake out then don't think for a second you are going to get to call the shots. That's for someone with a broader view that can see how IS/IT ties into the dollars that pays salaries (as a best-case) or for the guy that has to come up with the budget for all your connectivity (as a worst and all-too-often case).
Look to the big companies to see what computing means and how to structure IS/IT for your shop (and as part of the business). The size of the shop is different but all that means is that the bigger companies have to break out the parts that need individual management into individual groups. What's telling is where those boundries form and the roles that get created to manage computing at that scale. As a one person shop you'll have to wear all the hats but at least you'll have learned what the hats' roles are and how they fit into the whole.
The company is being either smart or stupid (you choose).
I totally agree with the poster that said if you were disgruntled you've already done your dirty-work before you provide notice. One of the first things I do at a company is write an email filter so I can run commands via my pager and have the results mailed back to me. It's saved me countless hours when out to supper. For some reason whenever my direct manager hears about this their reaction is a surprised look... (You can do that?!?) and then invariably the statement, "Don't tell anyone else about this, ok?".
On the other hand one of my employees provided us his two weeks notice. Too bad for him one of our managers was friends with the recruiter for the competitor he had just signed an offer letter from. Yes, he was providing two weeks notice to us while legally bound to work for the other guys in two weeks. I don't think he would have done anything in those two weeks (certainly not anything he couldn't have done afterwards as far as trade secrets go) but you really have to wonder about a guy that thinks it's ok to hope to work for two weeks when he's basically already working for the competition.
Don't take it personally. Ask yourself this, "I own a business. One of the folks that could *absolutely* screw me", (I assume this is you. With a bit of work and planning I could poison my companies backups for 6-10 weeks before anyone noticed and then crater all the servers. I'd live in a 5'x8' room for a *long* time after but it could be done.), "... *absolutely* screw me has just given 2 weeks notice. Do I a) trust that he's a good guy, b) cover my ass?" Different folks will answer that different ways.
M.E. Russel (Q): "Firefly" and "Serenity"'s political and cultural underpinnings are unusually well thought-out. You've obviously developed a whole system of planets, a Sino-American political system, a mix of languages. How long did the concept fester in your head before you started writing?
Joss Whedon (A): It festered for a while. It was probably two or three years after I came up with the idea that I made the TV show, a year-and-a-half doing that, and then a couple of years to write the movie. So it's had time to bake.
And people are always like, "They're fighting an evil empire!" And I'm like, "Well, it's not really an evil empire." The trick was always to create something that was complex enough that you could bring some debate to it -- that it wasn't black-and-white. It wasn't, "If we hit this porthole in the Death Star, everything will be fine!" It was messier than that, and the messiest thing is that the government is basically benign. It's the most advanced culturally....
More of the same (not evil) later in the interview.
WoW improved on the annoying aspects of EQ by a huge amount (by, for example, having a game where you could ever-quest). However some good ideas that others have had seem to be missing. Examples include avatars/sidekicks so you could play with folks of differing levels; a mechanism by which you could be part of more than one guild (but only one at once); a way to rework your character's physical profile (and really once I reach 60 why can't I just change classes but retain my level. Not expecting all my equip or gold but do I *really* have to grind up to 60 again?)
Also big kudos for allowing 3rd party addons but I'm surprised many of them (Autotravel should be core) aren't incorporated into the game.
So my question is how much does Not Invented Here play into what is implemented?
I've heard they are the bible... long, boring, and impossible to read.:)
Having said that I have them all and I have made a valid attempt to get through them on 4 occasions. I haven't succeeded but I've learned more each time.
I work for a large company. We had a Y2K remediation effort that started about one and a half years out. We had about 60 people on-call across the globe for midnight (great way to spend New Years Eve:/ and had one server outtage near midnight not related to Y2K.
What we did do is leave several servers in different datacenters that were going to be retired unpatched and running. As midnight swept across those datacenters and the patched machines kept running the unpatched ones would fail. Some right at midnight and some a few minutes later. It was a nice verification that all the work we had put in was worth the effort.
-CZ
PS - Yes the unpatched machines ran fine after a reboot. That's not the point of the story.
Luckily it's already known to the media. The first hit I get on http://news.google.com when entering "google censorship" is this/. thread.:)
It's been answered above that Google's photo index is out of date. I personally have a difficult time believing photo's of Lyndie England (Google does seem to know how to spell her name) aren't easy to find in Google but I'll pass judgement in a few days after the public roasting.
Ok... just changed my mind. http://news.google.com has *2* articles on Lyndie England???
I'll finish by quoting from http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html
To learn more about Google, click on the link at the left for the area that most interests you. Or type what you want to find into our search box and hit enter. Once you do, you'll be on your way to understanding why others say, "Google is the closest thing the Web has to an ultimate answer machine."
Agreed. The only way to wrap it up quicker is to have wormtongue toss the palantir at the party-crashers and end it with him slitting Saruman's throat and being arrowed down between the second and third book instead of at the end of the third.
And if you haven't read the books and that was a spoiler... get a (geek) life.
Back in college I ran across a website (eaaarly WWW) which had a small circuit you put between your batteries and a headlamp. A caver who had a EE degree had designed it. It had a small capacitor and circuitry to charge the capacitor based on a duty cycle for the batteries. (If I'm getting this all wrong my apologies. I know little about electronics.) As the batteries ran out of charge the duty cycle became quicker. It greatly extended the battery life but when the batteries died they did so in about 15 minutes instead of your headlamp just getting dimmer and dimmer.
I had always figured the battery-run device companies were in bed with the battery companies because such a circuit would seem a natural.
Couple of Google searches didn't turn it up which is a bummer because I could afford one these days.
http://www.linksys.com/support/default.asp >> GPL Code Center
http://www.linksys.com/support/gpl.asp
And from this page:
If you would like a copy of the GPL source code in Linksys products on a CD, please send $9.99 to Linksys for the costs of preparing and mailing the CD to you.
Plus individual source files available for download.
You say, "That's just ridiculous." And I can't agree more but I don't think we are talking about the same thing.
Please do some research before you accuse companies of stealing from the FSF on the basis of a magazine article which is rather slanted. Many large corporations understand both the benefit and limitations which are attached to working with OSS. Just because a company makes money off of using OSS doesn't mean they've done it by ignoring the GPL. In a lot of circles around here that seems to be an immediate conclusion.
us pop = 300M avg us family = 3.6 people # us families = 833,333 avg cars / family = 1.4 # cars in us 1,166M avg cars / gas station = 250
# gas stations = 6533
So my interviewee can do unit conversions. Doesn't tell me if he or she is gonna crack when they've got an angry engineer on the phone wondering why/usr/local is locked down because of course the engineer would NEVER fumble finger a command and break 4000 other people's environment.
The Hippocratic Oath was something you were taught because Hippocrates was the only person around teaching rigorous medicine. You learned it his way and followed it because that's what you were taught (by him or by someone taught by him). And in fact if you took the oath you couldn't teach anybody medicine that wasn't willing to abide by it themselves.
I already know how to code. Learned it from books and those willing to teach me. Lots of people learned it from other books and other teachers. Hard for a uniform ethic to take hold in that environment.
Not saying it wouldn't have been a GOOD THING(tm) but read the subject again.
My favorite paragraph has got to be where he says (paraphrased), "Sure if we go free/public-source Microsoft might lose sales but since you've been saying we are a bunch of software pirates stealing all your apps it can't be a very great loss can it?"
I work at a place that has gone a long way towards the paperless office. The paperless office isn't about replacing the GOOD paper like reports and documents. It's about replacing the BAD paper like vacation forms, transfer forms, etc. All that stuff that gets lost, folded, spindled, and then your HMO benefits or direct deposit doesn't get done correctly.
A paperless office is a GOOD THING(tm) but more of a good thing isn't necessarily better.
Slashdot Mirror
Good advice but some of it is a little overthought.
If you are the guys then when y'all are going to lunch someone says, "Hey, we're going to lunch. Want to go?" If you end up with a sexual harrassment suit against multiple guys over lunch then you probably deserve it.
If you are the gal then when you see the "gang" heading to lunch just say, "Hey. Are y'all going to lunch? Mind if I join?" Now this is important. When you are at lunch don't feel that you have to fill in any silences. Not unless you are genuinely curious about something. The IT groups I hang out with don't talk to hear themselves and if you do that's a very good way to get lunch organized and gone to right before you get out of that meeting your in. Also be aware that just talking to geeks will convince some of them that you would go out with them. If they ask you out and you don't want to go don't crush our... their pathetic little egos too hard.
And a final thought for the folks that haven't had to take Managing Within the Law. Sexual harrassment is a pattern. The victim must bring up the issue to management. Management is required to investigate. A sexual harrassment lawsuit can only occur (ok. Anyone can bring one but it won't be won without...) if management allowed the situation to continue once it was brought to their attention or the situation was so blatent that a reasonable person would have felt the workplace itself was harrassing and management should have been aware of the situation.
-CZ
Um... no.
My wife is a doctor and a member of the AMA. They aren't a union. You pay dues, they lobby (very effectively) for the industry, but they don't set wages.
Sign me up for all the organizations you want that promote computer science and IT (as opposed to IS who can all go rot in hell for all I care). I won't join a union that lets people that have read Programming For Dummies compete for the jobs I do. (Not that bosses don't hire those people anyway but I don't want it contractually obligated.)
My uninformed, union-uneducated, closely held opinion,
-CZ
Have them write like they speak. My writing got much better when I realized that I didn't have to fluff up the written text. You *can* fluff it up if that's what your audience expects but at least you'll have a starting point if you have what you would have said written down.
-CZ
Let's see... was it a Dr. Who episode that pointed this out? Maybe it was someone on slashdot.
I create a very intense magnetic field... (We'll ignore that neutron stars and/or other collapsed goodness also creates intense magnetic fields and those aren't popping around like pinballs.) I create a very intense magnetic field which as everyone knows is electro/magnetic and is propogated at best at the speed of light.
I turn off my intense magnetic field or heck, for that matter I turn it on. At some point the field doesn't become strong enough to pop me into this FTL dimension or it will be strong enough in a tiny bit of time but not *now* because of that light speed propogation. At the interface between strong-enough and not strong enough I am going to see *extremely* odd effects like, oh I don't know... "Hey, how come my body is over here but the bleeding stump of my leg is over there?"
Now, I'd love to learn that once again I had not studied hard enough in my physics classes (or don't recall the Dr. Who episode correctly) but I'm not gonna hold my breath.
-CZ
First off I'd define better terminology.
IS - Information Services/Systems - tend to deal with business applications (development, vetting, purchasing, etc. Proportion of each role being dependent from what I've seen on size of business. If you don't do in-house app development then that aspect doesn't apply to you), business systems (ordering, ERP, payroll), and management of the aspect of the business tied in with computing as a tool to forward the companies business goals.
IT - Information Technology - deals with the physical aspects of computing. Hardware, networks, disks, etc. This is where you tend to find sysadmin, network admin, and those folks that make sure the blinky lights can blink.
Facilities deals with the the physical space and items like power and cooling.
YMMV of course. If you are a one person shop you're going to be doing most of the above (note in your case though how the lack of management authority divorces you from the aspect of computing tied into achieving business goals).
Now, speaking as someone that's done sysadmining, software development, and management I think your view is off. You are trying to do the technical work and not tie it back into how the company makes money. That's fine if that's what you want to concentrate on but don't pretend there are no other aspects to using computers as a business tool. Also if that's the area (technical) you wish to stake out then don't think for a second you are going to get to call the shots. That's for someone with a broader view that can see how IS/IT ties into the dollars that pays salaries (as a best-case) or for the guy that has to come up with the budget for all your connectivity (as a worst and all-too-often case).
Look to the big companies to see what computing means and how to structure IS/IT for your shop (and as part of the business). The size of the shop is different but all that means is that the bigger companies have to break out the parts that need individual management into individual groups. What's telling is where those boundries form and the roles that get created to manage computing at that scale. As a one person shop you'll have to wear all the hats but at least you'll have learned what the hats' roles are and how they fit into the whole.
-CZ
The company is being either smart or stupid (you choose).
I totally agree with the poster that said if you were disgruntled you've already done your dirty-work before you provide notice. One of the first things I do at a company is write an email filter so I can run commands via my pager and have the results mailed back to me. It's saved me countless hours when out to supper. For some reason whenever my direct manager hears about this their reaction is a surprised look... (You can do that?!?) and then invariably the statement, "Don't tell anyone else about this, ok?".
On the other hand one of my employees provided us his two weeks notice. Too bad for him one of our managers was friends with the recruiter for the competitor he had just signed an offer letter from. Yes, he was providing two weeks notice to us while legally bound to work for the other guys in two weeks. I don't think he would have done anything in those two weeks (certainly not anything he couldn't have done afterwards as far as trade secrets go) but you really have to wonder about a guy that thinks it's ok to hope to work for two weeks when he's basically already working for the competition.
Don't take it personally. Ask yourself this, "I own a business. One of the folks that could *absolutely* screw me", (I assume this is you. With a bit of work and planning I could poison my companies backups for 6-10 weeks before anyone noticed and then crater all the servers. I'd live in a 5'x8' room for a *long* time after but it could be done.), "... *absolutely* screw me has just given 2 weeks notice. Do I a) trust that he's a good guy, b) cover my ass?" Different folks will answer that different ways.
-CZ
http://homepage.mac.com/merussell/iblog/B835531044 /C1592678312/E20050916182427/index.html
Section II, first question.
More of the same (not evil) later in the interview.-CZ
WoW improved on the annoying aspects of EQ by a huge amount (by, for example, having a game where you could ever-quest). However some good ideas that others have had seem to be missing. Examples include avatars/sidekicks so you could play with folks of differing levels; a mechanism by which you could be part of more than one guild (but only one at once); a way to rework your character's physical profile (and really once I reach 60 why can't I just change classes but retain my level. Not expecting all my equip or gold but do I *really* have to grind up to 60 again?)
Also big kudos for allowing 3rd party addons but I'm surprised many of them (Autotravel should be core) aren't incorporated into the game.
So my question is how much does Not Invented Here play into what is implemented?
-CZ
I've heard they are the bible... long, boring, and impossible to read. :)
Having said that I have them all and I have made a valid attempt to get through them on 4 occasions. I haven't succeeded but I've learned more each time.
-CZ
I work for a large company. We had a Y2K remediation effort that started about one and a half years out. We had about 60 people on-call across the globe for midnight (great way to spend New Years Eve :/ and had one server outtage near midnight not related to Y2K.
What we did do is leave several servers in different datacenters that were going to be retired unpatched and running. As midnight swept across those datacenters and the patched machines kept running the unpatched ones would fail. Some right at midnight and some a few minutes later. It was a nice verification that all the work we had put in was worth the effort.
-CZ
PS - Yes the unpatched machines ran fine after a reboot. That's not the point of the story.
It's been answered above that Google's photo index is out of date. I personally have a difficult time believing photo's of Lyndie England (Google does seem to know how to spell her name) aren't easy to find in Google but I'll pass judgement in a few days after the public roasting.
Ok... just changed my mind. http://news.google.com has *2* articles on Lyndie England???
I'll finish by quoting from http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html
-CZ
Agreed. The only way to wrap it up quicker is to have wormtongue toss the palantir at the party-crashers and end it with him slitting Saruman's throat and being arrowed down between the second and third book instead of at the end of the third.
And if you haven't read the books and that was a spoiler... get a (geek) life.
-CZ
Back in college I ran across a website (eaaarly WWW) which had a small circuit you put between your batteries and a headlamp. A caver who had a EE degree had designed it. It had a small capacitor and circuitry to charge the capacitor based on a duty cycle for the batteries. (If I'm getting this all wrong my apologies. I know little about electronics.) As the batteries ran out of charge the duty cycle became quicker. It greatly extended the battery life but when the batteries died they did so in about 15 minutes instead of your headlamp just getting dimmer and dimmer.
I had always figured the battery-run device companies were in bed with the battery companies because such a circuit would seem a natural.
Couple of Google searches didn't turn it up which is a bummer because I could afford one these days.
-CZ
http://www.linksys.com >> Support
http://www.linksys.com/support/default.asp >> GPL Code Center
http://www.linksys.com/support/gpl.asp
And from this page:
Plus individual source files available for download.
You say, "That's just ridiculous." And I can't agree more but I don't think we are talking about the same thing.
Please do some research before you accuse companies of stealing from the FSF on the basis of a magazine article which is rather slanted. Many large corporations understand both the benefit and limitations which are attached to working with OSS. Just because a company makes money off of using OSS doesn't mean they've done it by ignoring the GPL. In a lot of circles around here that seems to be an immediate conclusion.
-CZ
My /usr/share/units.dat file says ... hmm. I can't tell you what it says because /. doesn't like so many "junk" characters.
/usr/share/units.dat and grep for "Ki".
Open
Seems pretty straightforward that they should have known better.
-CZ
I think this paper
a pe r.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/p
clears all this up nicely. In particular this entire discussion reminded me of page 7 of the PDF version.
-CZ
I'm trying to think of a good job or university education that doesn't involve using a computer. Anyone? Anyone?
-CZ
Over 1 mil? Does anyone know how many lines of code there are in the linux kernel?
<pinkie>One BILLION lines of code!!</pinkie>
-CZ
It's definitely about cars and not area.
/usr/local is locked down because of course the engineer would NEVER fumble finger a command and break 4000 other people's environment.
I didn't have an envelope but with `bc' I get:
us pop = 300M
avg us family = 3.6 people
# us families = 833,333
avg cars / family = 1.4
# cars in us 1,166M
avg cars / gas station = 250
# gas stations = 6533
So my interviewee can do unit conversions. Doesn't tell me if he or she is gonna crack when they've got an angry engineer on the phone wondering why
-CZ
I don't know about anyone else but I've had them bookmarked for over a year. It's not like they just woke up and smelled the internet.
-CZ
Neo reads matrix. News at 11.
-CZ
I already know how to code. Learned it from books and those willing to teach me. Lots of people learned it from other books and other teachers. Hard for a uniform ethic to take hold in that environment.
Not saying it wouldn't have been a GOOD THING(tm) but read the subject again.
-CZ
My favorite paragraph has got to be where he says (paraphrased), "Sure if we go free/public-source Microsoft might lose sales but since you've been saying we are a bunch of software pirates stealing all your apps it can't be a very great loss can it?"
Too funny,
-CZ
I work at a place that has gone a long way towards the paperless office. The paperless office isn't about replacing the GOOD paper like reports and documents. It's about replacing the BAD paper like vacation forms, transfer forms, etc. All that stuff that gets lost, folded, spindled, and then your HMO benefits or direct deposit doesn't get done correctly.
A paperless office is a GOOD THING(tm) but more of a good thing isn't necessarily better.
-CZ
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/Apoll oLaser.html
If my tax dollars are going into this I'm ready to call the first time it was done "good enough for government work".
-CZ
PS - Preview shows the URL with a space between "Apoll" and "oLaser". If that's there on the final submission then take it out.