Now I can understand that the BBC felt the need to fill the article with stupid comparisons, but why can't the summary here just replace them with ellipses for the sake of the presumably more technical readership here? One would think that the typical slashdot reader would understand 600 Mrpm just fine and wouldn't need such twaddle as "This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill" for edification.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm just old and bitter. Now get off of my lawn.
If you can't follow a simple style guideline, what does that say about the rest of your code? When reviewing code, if I start to see a pattern of not adhering to the coding standards, I'll kick it back immediately. Why? Well, if you can't figure that out, then I don't expect you can figure out whatever algorithm you're working on either.
Coding standards are in place to enforce consistency throughout a code base and to save developer time. When reading code, you shouldn't have to be scanning for how things are indented or whether or not a bug is caused by a dangling else, you should be able to focus on the code. Looking through inconsistently formatted code takes additional time and effort - not much, but scale to a few thousand developers over a period of years, and that's a serious amount of wasted effort.
As others have said, if you want to write code your way, do it on your own time.
The low-tech kind. When learning Russian I was able to memorize a new wordlist (40-50 words) in 10-20 minutes after having written them all out on flash cards. The writing itself was a major part of the learning process. As for retention once learned, a lot of practice is really the only way. Reading out loud is actually fairly helpful, and conversation is the very best.
Maybe my brain has been drained, too, but, if all the educated people are leaving the US, wouldn't that be a good old regular brain drain and not a reverse brain drain?
...is to use the md5 sum (expressed in sexagesimal, of course) of the MAC address of the secondary NIC, prepended with an "n" for legibility. Simple, logical, and useful.
...in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner and a RAID whose power supply kept beeping loudly because it was sensitive to the fluctuations in voltage provided by our loud diesel generator parked just outside. I was coding up an interface to an Access '97 database on stripped down Win2k running on a very dirty laptop (mud made from the very fine dust I was breathing combined with the sweat dripping off my fingers would occasionally cause a key to stop working) in Perl using OLE, with *no* internet access and little documentation. Funny thing was, I actually was having a pretty good time.
That's one of the cool things about virtual machines: physical addresses in a VM are, in fact, virtual addresses. And anyways, I'm not sure about Xen and friends, but vmware has its own BIOS and own SMM code, and taking control of one VM's SMM (which none of these exploits can do, so it's a moot point) wouldn't affect the rest of of the host system at all.
I've dropped out of college six or so times (depends on how you count) and still don't have a degree. Nevertheless I'm holding a very technical and highly challenging and enjoyable programming position and absolutely no one I work with cares in the least about my interrupted education. What they do care about is my technical ability and I wouldn't have been hired if I hadn't been able to impress the engineers I interviewed with.
That said, the company I work for isn't too large, and I was referred by a friend, so I was able to clear the first hurdle of just getting noticed. It's unfortunate, but with larger companies especially, a decidedly non-technical person (or an equivalent SQL query) will be reviewing your resume and will only be looking for certain magic keywords. My advice is to make sure you're solid technically (which you should be anyways), then either try at smaller companies where you're more likely to be noticed, or impress someone and have them bring your resume in. There are, I'm sure, other ways to go about this, but that's my experience. Good luck.
Why not move from QA to dev in your current company? You (should) already know the product, so moving over internally will be a lot easier than switching to an entirely new place where, not only are you an entry-level developer, but you also don't know the product and the internal processes.
I'm not sure what "hefty boost" they're talking about. Follow the link and have a look at their stock - it's still nearly worthless (at least compared to what it was). In fact, because of how much it's tumbled, the default display (at least over at Yahoo) is logarithmic. Look at the linear scale and see just how hefty this boost really is.
I spent five years in the Army as a 98C, which isn't exactly IT, but since we're the "tech guys" of the MI branch, we ended up setting up and administering all of the classified systems in our unit. We were running a secure LAN on systems based around WinNT (though we switched everything but the domain server to 2000 when no one was watching) and Solaris. All of the hardware was COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) - most of our laptops were hardened Panasonics (CF-48's, I think). We did have some custom software for what we did, and I ended up writing several largish apps while I was deployed to Afghanistan.
As for IT training, we had some in AIT (Advanced Individual Training - job training), but most IT type training we did at our units. My OIC (Officer In Charge) made sure to send everyone he could to as many classes as we could, and most of the people in my section were pretty close to being either CCNA's or MCSE's (or both). The actual IT people (74 series like someone mentioned above) had even more training than we did. Of course I suppose it depends on where you're assigned - my unit always had way more money than we could ever spend (I was in special ops).
So to answer the original question, yes there is some exotic hardware/software out there (usually for very specific purposes), but the majority of the military uses the same stuff as civilians.
On another note, I've heard (someone please verify) that the military uses explosives to take care of old hard drives and storage media.
Nope, sorry to disappoint, but we don't do anything like that, though it would be pretty cool. The destruction process is so thoroughly regulated that it's often easier to just lock them in a safe and forget about them. In fact, in my office we have several ten year old hard drives. No one knows what's on them, just that they're sensitive, so they'll probably still be there ten years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I can understand that the BBC felt the need to fill the article with stupid comparisons, but why can't the summary here just replace them with ellipses for the sake of the presumably more technical readership here? One would think that the typical slashdot reader would understand 600 Mrpm just fine and wouldn't need such twaddle as "This spin speed is half a million times faster than a domestic washing machine and more than a thousand times faster than a dental drill" for edification.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm just old and bitter. Now get off of my lawn.
If you can't follow a simple style guideline, what does that say about the rest of your code? When reviewing code, if I start to see a pattern of not adhering to the coding standards, I'll kick it back immediately. Why? Well, if you can't figure that out, then I don't expect you can figure out whatever algorithm you're working on either.
Coding standards are in place to enforce consistency throughout a code base and to save developer time. When reading code, you shouldn't have to be scanning for how things are indented or whether or not a bug is caused by a dangling else, you should be able to focus on the code. Looking through inconsistently formatted code takes additional time and effort - not much, but scale to a few thousand developers over a period of years, and that's a serious amount of wasted effort.
As others have said, if you want to write code your way, do it on your own time.
The low-tech kind. When learning Russian I was able to memorize a new wordlist (40-50 words) in 10-20 minutes after having written them all out on flash cards. The writing itself was a major part of the learning process. As for retention once learned, a lot of practice is really the only way. Reading out loud is actually fairly helpful, and conversation is the very best.
Maybe my brain has been drained, too, but, if all the educated people are leaving the US, wouldn't that be a good old regular brain drain and not a reverse brain drain?
...is to use the md5 sum (expressed in sexagesimal, of course) of the MAC address of the secondary NIC, prepended with an "n" for legibility. Simple, logical, and useful.
...in the middle of summer with a broken air conditioner and a RAID whose power supply kept beeping loudly because it was sensitive to the fluctuations in voltage provided by our loud diesel generator parked just outside. I was coding up an interface to an Access '97 database on stripped down Win2k running on a very dirty laptop (mud made from the very fine dust I was breathing combined with the sweat dripping off my fingers would occasionally cause a key to stop working) in Perl using OLE, with *no* internet access and little documentation. Funny thing was, I actually was having a pretty good time.
That's one of the cool things about virtual machines: physical addresses in a VM are, in fact, virtual addresses. And anyways, I'm not sure about Xen and friends, but vmware has its own BIOS and own SMM code, and taking control of one VM's SMM (which none of these exploits can do, so it's a moot point) wouldn't affect the rest of of the host system at all.
for those who don't want to RTFA: http://www.cdsmodel.com/
I've dropped out of college six or so times (depends on how you count) and still don't have a degree. Nevertheless I'm holding a very technical and highly challenging and enjoyable programming position and absolutely no one I work with cares in the least about my interrupted education. What they do care about is my technical ability and I wouldn't have been hired if I hadn't been able to impress the engineers I interviewed with.
That said, the company I work for isn't too large, and I was referred by a friend, so I was able to clear the first hurdle of just getting noticed. It's unfortunate, but with larger companies especially, a decidedly non-technical person (or an equivalent SQL query) will be reviewing your resume and will only be looking for certain magic keywords. My advice is to make sure you're solid technically (which you should be anyways), then either try at smaller companies where you're more likely to be noticed, or impress someone and have them bring your resume in. There are, I'm sure, other ways to go about this, but that's my experience. Good luck.
Why not move from QA to dev in your current company? You (should) already know the product, so moving over internally will be a lot easier than switching to an entirely new place where, not only are you an entry-level developer, but you also don't know the product and the internal processes.
Man, am I glad I don't have to work with people like you.
I'm not sure what "hefty boost" they're talking about. Follow the link and have a look at their stock - it's still nearly worthless (at least compared to what it was). In fact, because of how much it's tumbled, the default display (at least over at Yahoo) is logarithmic. Look at the linear scale and see just how hefty this boost really is.
I spent five years in the Army as a 98C, which isn't exactly IT, but since we're the "tech guys" of the MI branch, we ended up setting up and administering all of the classified systems in our unit. We were running a secure LAN on systems based around WinNT (though we switched everything but the domain server to 2000 when no one was watching) and Solaris. All of the hardware was COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) - most of our laptops were hardened Panasonics (CF-48's, I think). We did have some custom software for what we did, and I ended up writing several largish apps while I was deployed to Afghanistan.
As for IT training, we had some in AIT (Advanced Individual Training - job training), but most IT type training we did at our units. My OIC (Officer In Charge) made sure to send everyone he could to as many classes as we could, and most of the people in my section were pretty close to being either CCNA's or MCSE's (or both). The actual IT people (74 series like someone mentioned above) had even more training than we did. Of course I suppose it depends on where you're assigned - my unit always had way more money than we could ever spend (I was in special ops).
So to answer the original question, yes there is some exotic hardware/software out there (usually for very specific purposes), but the majority of the military uses the same stuff as civilians.