Again a lot of it depends on how much the employees like the job (directly tied to the ratio of nice friendly customers to jerks), but the coffee at the Speedway where I worked was pretty good. Not quite a fancy candy-coffee like the local coffee houses, but not a bad cuppa.
One of the other stores where I subbed in occasion (ie lotta jerks who got switched to decaf), the coffee never tasted quite right because the machines weren't cleaned as often as they should have been nor were the grinders and percolators checked to see if they were measuring the product right.
You may not want to disclose details or you'll get flooded with sympathy calls and such, but I think your friends and close associates will be kind enough to understand that you are going through some personal issues right now. Your health is more important than anyones computer.
Yes of course it would be better to fix the memory leak. Sometimes things like that are hard to track down and it is more effective to deal with it when it happens rather than trying to prevent it.
Software bugs are inevitable. As a developer I do my best to fix as many bugs as I can, but I still know that something will go wrong. Since I know that something will go wrong sooner or later, I also make provisions to recover from failures.
Many faults are completely out of my control, say a disk failure while I'm trying to write a file. I certainly can't stop the disk failure, but I can write my application to do something nice when it can't write rather than just crashing.
We're discussing such issues in a class I'm taking on software fault tolerance. In discussing selective restarts and backup processes Apache is frequently cited as an example of how software should fail gracefully, consistently, and then handle that failure itself. The lecture slides can be found here: http://wwwse.inf.tu-dresden.de/index.php?language= English&site=courses&course=ss06vl02
Apache has some memory leaks in it. It is not bad, it happens, especially in a piece of software like that which is expected to run constantly and NEVER fail. So what the Apache software does is every so often, or when it detects that its memory usage is getting out of hand, it fires up a second copy of itself and then kills itself letting the new not-yet-leaky copy take over.
So to you (IT/admin) that daemon may run forever, but thats because my people (CS/developer) did our jobs (for once) and ensured that the application cleaned up its own messes.
I was told that we very rarely had a client drop a contract->perm employee. Now I wonder if I was being lied to.
Thanks for letting me know that the contract->perm thing isn't all roses. I'm graduating as soon as I get back to the US and starting my own career. I'm going to have to watch out for the downside to contract->perm.
Last semester I interned at a computer consulting firm as a human resources recruiting assistant. The job was far from what I wanted to do, but I was in a specialzed political program and they felt that getting the CS major away from the keyboard would be more in line with that. I did learn a lot that I would not have learned if I were in a software development role, but I am certainly NOT an HR person. Bear with me, this is all very important for job seekers and does tie into the topic.
Anyway heres how it goes when a company doesn't do all/any of its own HR. They have a list, sometimes exclusive other times not, of HR/Consulting firms that they send job requests to. Those requests specify the length of the contract, the salary range, a brief (VERY) job description, and desired skills. It then became my bosses job to hand me that piece of paper from which I had to parse out a monster (we ONLY used monster for some reason) search string and start calling people.
First off we had an implied policy that we didn't bother with confidential resumes. Send an email and then leave it. Our response rate from those was exceedingly low, single-digit percentages.
We did have an easier time than many consulting contracting firms because nearly all of our contracts were temp-to-perm and my employer had farily good benefits. The way that works is a new hire was an employee of ours for 3 to 6 months, recieving pay and benefits from us while working for our client. At the end of that term, if the client was happy the client could then hire that employee on as thier own without paying us a finders fee. My employer got a (significant) cut, our clients got good people, and good people got full time, permanent jobs.
That sounds all well and good but human resources is not some place I can work and feel good about it. I had to look at a resume, review the stated skills in comparision to the desired skills, look at the employment history and see if/how those skills were actually used, and if that matched then I made a call (resumes with phone numbers get priority, because we can get you right away) and talked to the candidate to see if they were really interested.
Now I get to take a job description that was less than a paragraph with some notes/comments from my boss and tell (NEVER sell) the candidate about the position. Then if they were interested I had to ask questions and see if this person really had what we wanted for the job. It was hard because my boss (and by implication our clients) had very specific requriements, there was no room for 'I think this guy would be good' I had to take the vagaries of resumes and HR talk and salary requirements and quantify them. My coworkers (Hi Jeff, Julie, Lee, and Steve!) were great people and could handle that. It is very difficult.
Now coming back to the point, when we saw a resume of on of our people. We DID NOT CARE. If anything it was a good guide, as I'm reading the first few parts of the resume "Oh wow this guy would be perfect....because he is already doing (job) for (client).". I usually printed those out and used them as examples to compare to other resumes.
If you are looking for something better and not serious about going to a new job, you are wasting my time and yours. If you are "seeing whats out there" then you are a liability, it looks bad for us when an employee quits in the middle of a contract, it wastes my time, it wastes our clients time, and it shows an apalling lack of responsibility on your part. We were not hiring short-term contractors who were looking for adventure and new jobs every 3 months, we were looking for reliable, competent, full-time, well paid, permanent employees. If you want to see whats out there tell us when we call, we'll tell you what is out there, but we have other shit to do. Don't sit there chatting us up.
If you honestly are looking for a new job then I offer you the following advice. If you have an itemized list of skills, programming languages, apps etc. on your resume you need to be able to te
I'm an American college student doing an internship (IM A WHORE http://yoosic.com/ and studying at the Technical Univeristy of Dresden.
I have a fiance' and several close friends back home. We realized that our own parents, even our older siblings (Gen X), didn't have the communication tools that we are graced with. Calls overseas are kind of expensive, about $0.10 a minute if they call me using a calling card and $0.30 a minute if I use a ring-back service here. Its unaffordable if we call directly.
I was happy when my boss clued me in to Skype. Free text/voice/video calls to another Skype user and a mere $.02, hot damn. $10 a month and I can call everyone, even the older family without computers. No dice according to the IT people here.
I get 3 gigabytes a month. When I'm at home I like to listen to internet radio (http://rtds.org/ which is perfectly legal. I am a computer science student at a new university, I've had to pull down quite a few tools, papers, lecture slides, research for presentations via the ACM archives, etc.
I am so used to having unlimited internet access. I know that it is still a luxury and many of my peers have less contact back home, but it is a great lift to someone who is so far from home to be able to stay in touch.
In essence all I really need is around 500 kbps and set my large downloads to run when I'm not actively using my laptop. My usage is very legal and could be considered necessary for my coursework and in an extreme case the psychological health or my family and I.
If I exceed my cap, it would be nice if someone would ask if I can legitimize my usage, but thats not the nature of the management.
If you want to limit how much soda I get you can give me a smaller straw or give me a smaller glass, but understand that we have agreed on some minimum volumes and flow rates of my soda. Or more appropriately in my case, I can only buy soda from you and I have to take what I can get.
There are a lot of places that, surprisingly, are NOT The United States of America. I hear that those places are prone to ignoring laws passed by the United States. I cannot fathom why those things that are not America would not follow our laws, but I do believe it would make it hard to use a United States law to get them to move thier titties and cockies to a different server.
Four simultaneous LCD display of Watts, Power Factor or VA, Voltage or Hz, Amps - FOUR!!! LCD!! Come on. True RMS Voltage and current measurements of sine, square, triangular and distorted wave forms with a crest factor 5 - Richard M Stallman voltage!! Sine waves! Plug device to be tested directly into the Power Analyzer - It plugs in to something, thats gotta be cool. Built in Datalogger stores up to 1,012 readings. Choice of single record storage or continuous datalogging - Configurable options, sweet. Choice of battery or AC/DC adaptor power provides line isolation - isolation something all geeks cherish Max Recall, Data Hold, Overload Protection - Max anything is always cool. Overlord prote^H, ok well can't have it all. Sampling (update) rate is 2.5 times per second - 2.5 times per second, thats gotta be a lot of BOGOMIPS Windows® based software allows user to download stored data or save data directly, and to create an ASCII file. - Windows software just begging to be compiled into a kernel loaded into a router Computations include phase angle, apparent and reactive power, consumption and cost, and power factor correction - Reactive power, whatever it is, has got to be hardcore badass to the extreme.
Power meters not cool, turn your badge in at the door!
You bring up a point that I needed to address simply to move across the state.
"Do I really NEED this?"
I've moved 4 times in 6 months, its about to become 5. I'm a college student doing work at other schools in the state and the next one will be out to Germany. Each time I've moved I have found things like old computers, empty shell casings, "project enclosures" (old liqor bottles and neat metal boxes, old notes from classes, clothes that don't fit, clothes that I never wear, sex toys from ex's that were angrily thrown somewhere, pots/pans that were totally redundant, glassware (I was living alone and had nearly 150 glasses, mugs, and cups), the list goes on.
The thing is, I donated, recycled, sold, and disposed of nearly 70% of my posessions. I still have the things that have value to me, either useful value or sentimental value, but I don't have all the clutter and the 'stuff'. Open space, and not having a self-stor unit crammed to the gills with scrap is incredibly liberating.
Looking down the list, it seems like we all have about the same choices for roughly the same prices no matter where we live.
To put it crudely, you get to choose who fucks you in the ass with a bowling pin (telco, cable, satellite). The choice lies in who uses a lubricant that you like the smell of (free install, package deals, free router etc). Meanwhile the regulators, local councils, and other government types are there with thier pliers clamped firmly on your genitals. Ultimately you are getting laid (faster than dialup) but you really aren't having as much fun as you had hoped.
Wipe themselves out how? They probably don't have self-destruct routines, 1. Its more code weight, harder to transport, run, and create. 2. The bot virus writers have probably read the villiany HOWTO which advises against installing a self-destruct device because invariably the hero will use it as a very easy means to destroy the superweapon.
At one agency, 90 laptop computers were configured to search for a wireless connection while they were plugged in to a wireless network -- an easy way in for snoops and hackers.
Well no wonder the wireless security is a flop! If they can plug in they need wired security. Some people, sheesh..
Slashdot Mirror
Again a lot of it depends on how much the employees like the job (directly tied to the ratio of nice friendly customers to jerks), but the coffee at the Speedway where I worked was pretty good. Not quite a fancy candy-coffee like the local coffee houses, but not a bad cuppa.
One of the other stores where I subbed in occasion (ie lotta jerks who got switched to decaf), the coffee never tasted quite right because the machines weren't cleaned as often as they should have been nor were the grinders and percolators checked to see if they were measuring the product right.
Unless the gas station attendant is bored and looking for some fun.
If you're careful you can ease the dosages up so the heavily caffinated come off of it and the non-caffinated start to need it.
"... able to provide "lifetime cancer protection"."
The article fails to mention that 'lifetime' can be greatly affected by the neighboring reptile obesity study.
"The milk must be as close as possible to 0 degrees and as far as possible from its expiry date."
I tried your chemical experiment with some milk that was nearly a month past its expiry date.
I am not impressed, sir. Not at all.
Subject says it. I agree with the parent poster.
You may not want to disclose details or you'll get flooded with sympathy calls and such, but I think your friends and close associates will be kind enough to understand that you are going through some personal issues right now. Your health is more important than anyones computer.
Yes of course it would be better to fix the memory leak. Sometimes things like that are hard to track down and it is more effective to deal with it when it happens rather than trying to prevent it.
Software bugs are inevitable. As a developer I do my best to fix as many bugs as I can, but I still know that something will go wrong. Since I know that something will go wrong sooner or later, I also make provisions to recover from failures.
Many faults are completely out of my control, say a disk failure while I'm trying to write a file. I certainly can't stop the disk failure, but I can write my application to do something nice when it can't write rather than just crashing.
Egads! My education is useful!
= English&site=courses&course=ss06vl02
We're discussing such issues in a class I'm taking on software fault tolerance. In discussing selective restarts and backup processes Apache is frequently cited as an example of how software should fail gracefully, consistently, and then handle that failure itself. The lecture slides can be found here: http://wwwse.inf.tu-dresden.de/index.php?language
Apache has some memory leaks in it. It is not bad, it happens, especially in a piece of software like that which is expected to run constantly and NEVER fail. So what the Apache software does is every so often, or when it detects that its memory usage is getting out of hand, it fires up a second copy of itself and then kills itself letting the new not-yet-leaky copy take over.
So to you (IT/admin) that daemon may run forever, but thats because my people (CS/developer) did our jobs (for once) and ensured that the application cleaned up its own messes.
I was told that we very rarely had a client drop a contract->perm employee. Now I wonder if I was being lied to.
Thanks for letting me know that the contract->perm thing isn't all roses. I'm graduating as soon as I get back to the US and starting my own career. I'm going to have to watch out for the downside to contract->perm.
Last semester I interned at a computer consulting firm as a human resources recruiting assistant. The job was far from what I wanted to do, but I was in a specialzed political program and they felt that getting the CS major away from the keyboard would be more in line with that. I did learn a lot that I would not have learned if I were in a software development role, but I am certainly NOT an HR person. Bear with me, this is all very important for job seekers and does tie into the topic.
Anyway heres how it goes when a company doesn't do all/any of its own HR. They have a list, sometimes exclusive other times not, of HR/Consulting firms that they send job requests to. Those requests specify the length of the contract, the salary range, a brief (VERY) job description, and desired skills. It then became my bosses job to hand me that piece of paper from which I had to parse out a monster (we ONLY used monster for some reason) search string and start calling people.
First off we had an implied policy that we didn't bother with confidential resumes. Send an email and then leave it. Our response rate from those was exceedingly low, single-digit percentages.
We did have an easier time than many consulting contracting firms because nearly all of our contracts were temp-to-perm and my employer had farily good benefits. The way that works is a new hire was an employee of ours for 3 to 6 months, recieving pay and benefits from us while working for our client. At the end of that term, if the client was happy the client could then hire that employee on as thier own without paying us a finders fee. My employer got a (significant) cut, our clients got good people, and good people got full time, permanent jobs.
That sounds all well and good but human resources is not some place I can work and feel good about it. I had to look at a resume, review the stated skills in comparision to the desired skills, look at the employment history and see if/how those skills were actually used, and if that matched then I made a call (resumes with phone numbers get priority, because we can get you right away) and talked to the candidate to see if they were really interested.
Now I get to take a job description that was less than a paragraph with some notes/comments from my boss and tell (NEVER sell) the candidate about the position. Then if they were interested I had to ask questions and see if this person really had what we wanted for the job. It was hard because my boss (and by implication our clients) had very specific requriements, there was no room for 'I think this guy would be good' I had to take the vagaries of resumes and HR talk and salary requirements and quantify them. My coworkers (Hi Jeff, Julie, Lee, and Steve!) were great people and could handle that. It is very difficult.
Now coming back to the point, when we saw a resume of on of our people. We DID NOT CARE. If anything it was a good guide, as I'm reading the first few parts of the resume "Oh wow this guy would be perfect....because he is already doing (job) for (client).". I usually printed those out and used them as examples to compare to other resumes.
If you are looking for something better and not serious about going to a new job, you are wasting my time and yours. If you are "seeing whats out there" then you are a liability, it looks bad for us when an employee quits in the middle of a contract, it wastes my time, it wastes our clients time, and it shows an apalling lack of responsibility on your part. We were not hiring short-term contractors who were looking for adventure and new jobs every 3 months, we were looking for reliable, competent, full-time, well paid, permanent employees. If you want to see whats out there tell us when we call, we'll tell you what is out there, but we have other shit to do. Don't sit there chatting us up.
If you honestly are looking for a new job then I offer you the following advice. If you have an itemized list of skills, programming languages, apps etc. on your resume you need to be able to te
An article about AOL in USA Today.
God bless low the quality that the average American demands and respects.
Simple, Open Source, 3D Game Engine
You get any two.
"Having passwords sitting around in clear-text isn't the wisest of ideas, and is against most security 'best practice' guidelines."
MOST?!?
Which security guidlines say it is ok and what companies are using them?
Its moving water hundreds of miles under the ice in the same way a normal river moves water hundreds of miles.
40,000 Leagues Under The Sea wasn't about diving deep, it was about going far.
I'm an American college student doing an internship (IM A WHORE http://yoosic.com/ and studying at the Technical Univeristy of Dresden.
I have a fiance' and several close friends back home. We realized that our own parents, even our older siblings (Gen X), didn't have the communication tools that we are graced with. Calls overseas are kind of expensive, about $0.10 a minute if they call me using a calling card and $0.30 a minute if I use a ring-back service here. Its unaffordable if we call directly.
I was happy when my boss clued me in to Skype. Free text/voice/video calls to another Skype user and a mere $.02, hot damn. $10 a month and I can call everyone, even the older family without computers. No dice according to the IT people here.
I get 3 gigabytes a month. When I'm at home I like to listen to internet radio (http://rtds.org/ which is perfectly legal. I am a computer science student at a new university, I've had to pull down quite a few tools, papers, lecture slides, research for presentations via the ACM archives, etc.
I am so used to having unlimited internet access. I know that it is still a luxury and many of my peers have less contact back home, but it is a great lift to someone who is so far from home to be able to stay in touch.
In essence all I really need is around 500 kbps and set my large downloads to run when I'm not actively using my laptop. My usage is very legal and could be considered necessary for my coursework and in an extreme case the psychological health or my family and I.
If I exceed my cap, it would be nice if someone would ask if I can legitimize my usage, but thats not the nature of the management.
If you want to limit how much soda I get you can give me a smaller straw or give me a smaller glass, but understand that we have agreed on some minimum volumes and flow rates of my soda. Or more appropriately in my case, I can only buy soda from you and I have to take what I can get.
looking at this map: http://moat.nlanr.net/International/images/collab_ world_map.gif
There are a lot of places that, surprisingly, are NOT The United States of America. I hear that those places are prone to ignoring laws passed by the United States. I cannot fathom why those things that are not America would not follow our laws, but I do believe it would make it hard to use a United States law to get them to move thier titties and cockies to a different server.
But look at the specs!
I EWPROD&ProdID=98:
From http://www.extechstore.com/index.asp?PageAction=V
Four simultaneous LCD display of Watts, Power Factor or VA, Voltage or Hz, Amps - FOUR!!! LCD!! Come on.
True RMS Voltage and current measurements of sine, square, triangular and distorted wave forms with a crest factor 5 - Richard M Stallman voltage!! Sine waves!
Plug device to be tested directly into the Power Analyzer - It plugs in to something, thats gotta be cool.
Built in Datalogger stores up to 1,012 readings. Choice of single record storage or continuous datalogging - Configurable options, sweet.
Choice of battery or AC/DC adaptor power provides line isolation - isolation something all geeks cherish
Max Recall, Data Hold, Overload Protection - Max anything is always cool. Overlord prote^H, ok well can't have it all.
Sampling (update) rate is 2.5 times per second - 2.5 times per second, thats gotta be a lot of BOGOMIPS
Windows® based software allows user to download stored data or save data directly, and to create an ASCII file. - Windows software just begging to be compiled into a kernel loaded into a router
Computations include phase angle, apparent and reactive power, consumption and cost, and power factor correction - Reactive power, whatever it is, has got to be hardcore badass to the extreme.
Power meters not cool, turn your badge in at the door!
"I crammed 14 vanilla box PC computers..."
You bring up a point that I needed to address simply to move across the state.
"Do I really NEED this?"
I've moved 4 times in 6 months, its about to become 5. I'm a college student doing work at other schools in the state and the next one will be out to Germany. Each time I've moved I have found things like old computers, empty shell casings, "project enclosures" (old liqor bottles and neat metal boxes, old notes from classes, clothes that don't fit, clothes that I never wear, sex toys from ex's that were angrily thrown somewhere, pots/pans that were totally redundant, glassware (I was living alone and had nearly 150 glasses, mugs, and cups), the list goes on.
The thing is, I donated, recycled, sold, and disposed of nearly 70% of my posessions. I still have the things that have value to me, either useful value or sentimental value, but I don't have all the clutter and the 'stuff'. Open space, and not having a self-stor unit crammed to the gills with scrap is incredibly liberating.
What skit is that??
By god if there is a rotary gimmick my people need to know about it!!
...on the RX-series as well as the wankel-style rotary engine check out the following:
http://rx7club.com/
http://fc3s.org/
http://www.mazdatrix.com/
http://rx7.org/
and if you live in or near Ohio:
http://www.ohiorotaries.com/
These are some of the better sites/forums maintained and populated with rotorheads.
Its a two way exchange too, if you know anything about multi-fuel or new fuel vehicles we would like to hear from you as well.
Using that as a premise does it also follow that Dell should use Americans for service/support call centres in the US??
"...Brazil or Ohio."
I live in Ohio, have for most of my life. Brazil should be deeply offended.
"We MUST stop ID!"
GOD COMMANDS IT!
Wait a minute......
Looking down the list, it seems like we all have about the same choices for roughly the same prices no matter where we live.
To put it crudely, you get to choose who fucks you in the ass with a bowling pin (telco, cable, satellite). The choice lies in who uses a lubricant that you like the smell of (free install, package deals, free router etc). Meanwhile the regulators, local councils, and other government types are there with thier pliers clamped firmly on your genitals. Ultimately you are getting laid (faster than dialup) but you really aren't having as much fun as you had hoped.
Wipe themselves out how? They probably don't have self-destruct routines,
1. Its more code weight, harder to transport, run, and create.
2. The bot virus writers have probably read the villiany HOWTO which advises against installing a self-destruct device because invariably the hero will use it as a very easy means to destroy the superweapon.
At one agency, 90 laptop computers were configured to search for a wireless connection while they were plugged in to a wireless network -- an easy way in for snoops and hackers.
Well no wonder the wireless security is a flop! If they can plug in they need wired security. Some people, sheesh..