You can easily go around the new policy by getting them to acknowledge fair use. Your job requires timely access to these messages. Either they let you continue to use your personal cell (I use mine for the exact reason too, so I feel your pain) or then your effectiveness takes a hit. That is of course unless they are willing to get you a cheap cell phone that can receive text messages. Virgin Mobile prepaid cell phones start at $50 and the minimum usage is $20 every 90 days, which won't raise any eyebrows. Inbound SMS is free, outbound is 10 cents per message.
The thing to understand is that the company is entitled to set these rules. I have seen bus drivers steer with one hand while chatting in the cell, that is a no-no. At a previous job we had people that expected to be entitled to spend the day talking to their girlfriends on the cell all day. Others would bring their laptops and forget to patch and scan them before plugging in. And so it goes...
At my current job I work from my personal laptop. The company provided me a Windows desktop but I elected to bring my own iBook and then later switched to a Powerbook. My boss understands that due to the nature of my work it is better for me to use that machine and move around with it, his only concern is that I must make sure my work files are kept in a network drive that is in the backups schedule. He is also concerned about theft, but the only real work material kept in the laptop is old emails and some perl scripts that would be useless to an outsider. If the laptop breaks (heaven forbid!) then I still have my work computer sitting there and I can use it while the powerbook is being repaired.
You can't have any emotional ties with your employees. No friends, no family and specially no girlfriends. This is a company we are talking about, not a hobby.
There is nothing more painful than hiring a friend only to have to let her go because you cannot afford her anymore. It happened to me, and more than two years after I still feel guilty as hell. Even if she understood what was happening, and I had given her heads up a couple months in advance, it still affected the relationship.
What you need is a person to whom you are acquainted professionally, but not on a too close personal level. If you are running the company then basically you don't have friends there, period. This is why the girlfriend is a no-no. I have witnessed what happens when you break the "don't shit where you eat" rule, and it is not pretty.
The only place I have seen where something like that works remotely is because the CEO and President of the company are husband and wife and they hold stakes in the company. They are extremely careful to make sure there is a line drawn between their private and work lives, and we are never left feeling uncomfortable.
We also had married couples when I was in the Army, but 99% of the time the Army made sure they were sent to separate units. If in the same unit, then they were sent to opposite shifts.
The only place where I have seen families consistently succeeding in running a business together is in the food and service sectors. Little mom and pops usually run smoothly but only if the whole family supports the operation. There is a chain of restaurants in North Virginia, Joe's, that has the best inexpensive italian food in all of DC Metro. Small problem: if you want the best they have, then you can only go to the main restaurant location because that is where "Joe" and most of the kids hang out. The other locations have less of a family presence, so they lose some of the touch that drives us to come back time and again.
And of course, remember that girlfriends come and go, but family is forever. Maybe there is away you can make it work with your folks, but the girlfriend is a definitely no-no.
Very affordable concrete extrusion machines have been available for years to do smaller jobs like edging sidewalks and that kind of thing. I saw one that extrudes a neat little feet-tall wall (which does not have to be straight) for use in gardening and landscaping.
The way I see their only problems are the scale of the job itself and the proper characteristics of the extruded material so when it dries properly you are left with a strong structure.
I am 33. When I was 10 or 11 my aunt gave me two sets of encyclopedias. One was the standard Britannica-type collection, probably 30 volumes or so. The other one was broken down into subjects.
Problem #1: Both encyclopedias were published in Spain, and we lived in Puerto Rico, which is a US Commonwealth, so most of the political and cultural slant of both was aimed at Europeans and made a lot of the content very confusing.
Problem #2: These things take a long time to put together. By the time it goes on sale most of the content is a couple years old. All the machinery, cars, airplanes, inventions, etc. looked already outdated.
Problem #3 was the size, but that was the early 80's so it was not the end of the world. Back then we were used to the idea of having to lookup an index while now we expect all information to be one GIS away.
Encyclopedias are terribly outdated and are competing with free information resources that are up to date and more reliable. They are expensive and they take a lot of space.
The one thing I miss about them is that (at least both of mine) had some really kickass layered diagrams of cool stuff like nuclear reactors, car engines, a submarine, etc. The diagrams were printed on clear plastic and as you leafed thru it you would go deeper into the workings of the machine. Now of course we can have something like a QTVR movie or a Flash animation to do much better, but for many years that was the only way to go.
You just need to remove the rear part of the convertible top. Not that you need to do that, since most routine maintenance points are located elsewhere in the car.
As for removing the engine, the car was designed from day zero so removing the engine could be done without much hassle. Of course, it sucks that you cannot show off the engine, but let's be realistic, none of the Porsche engines have much to show. The engines on the 911/996 series are covered with fans and junk, and the engines in the Cayenne have moldings all over.
Now, lemme tell you about something retarded. My last 3 cars were different generations of the Mazda Miata/MX-5/Eunos roadster. Both the Mk.1 and Mk.2 have the battery (a space saver gel battery about half as big as a normal battery) is located on the right rear fender. Mk.1 have it inside of the fender itself, while the MK.2 has it under the trunk space level. They did this mostly for balance. You can change the battery in a minute or two, just like every other car I have owned in my life. So I was a bit spoiled about how easy it is to change a car battery.
That is, until the Dodge.
My wife drives a 1997 Dodge Stratus. The battery finally gave away the ghost, but for the couple years we had it so far I had never seen the battery. Where the battery is usually located it has two bright plastic caps for contact points in case you need to jump start. One is red, the other black, pretty straightforward.
The battery is nowhere to be seen.
I am a mechanical engineer by training and a car nut, so I felt very embarrassed to have to spend more than one minute looking for something so damn big! Eventually I found it. It was crammed inside the front half of the front left fender well. The fender well had a faint outline of a battery. That meant the fender well had to be removed to have access to the battery.
Small problem. The wheel is in the way! To hell with it, I drove to a car/tire store and they quoted me $50 for a new battery, installed. I asked 3 times just to be safe. They kept saying $50, so I said sure. The way I see it I'll pay $10 for the battery and $40 for the amusement of watching some poor bastard try to change my battery.
The job took at least 30 minutes, of which 15 were wasted by the mechanic trying to find out where the battery was located at. The other 15 went into putting the car in a lift to remove the wheel so the battery could be switched. Ouch.
THAT to me is worse than the stupid hood being welded shut.
Please mod up the above comment. The reason MS invested the $150 million was to prove they were not trying to crush Apple. Apple was of course hurting, but it was a PR move on MS's part, not some obscure evil plan to take them over, crush them, etc.
The only thing Apple was guilty in the $150 million mess was to project Bill Gates on a giant screen for the announcement: it was too much like the 1984 commercial!
They also work well on older versions of Windows, since the card did most of the hard work you never really needed a very strong PC. We were doing satellite network analysis on a P133 with a little bit of ram and it ran beautifully, and this was on VB6 which was super bloated!
That sounds about right, I was stationed in Landstuhl (in Kaiserslautern) in '93-'97 and our HP Spectrum Analyzers were $60K or worse.
We also were tempted to jam the satellites but the problem was that the guy at DISA that ran the SATCOM network was a legendary ass and it was not worth the trouble to mess with him. His teletype initials were "HB" which we interpreted for "Hairy Balls."
This is the military agency that sells surplus equipment to the public. They usually have stuff like what you need.
If you can find something that has a HPIB/GPIB bus connector (IEEE-488) then you can connect it to a PC and use program your own interface (the libraries are very simple and very well documented). We did this both in the Army and also at a commercial satellite communications company (ours was to interface with HP spectrum analyzers thru IEEE-488).
If you want a babe magnet, get a 12" iBook G4. Girls find it irresistible. Buy a Powerbook and all you will attract is going to be nerds. Why do you think the iBook looks like a chiclet?
Every job I have held since I finished my US Army enlistment has been found thru either Monster (or their predecessor, OCC) or Cyber Coders.
I got my first civilian job thru OCC while I was still in Germany (I had to hop on a C141 MAC flight to DC for the interview, it was a blast!). I got my second civilian job thru monster. The first code I wrote for them was, check this out, an online jobs site!
My third job was thru Cybercoders. That one was really neat, I still remember the subject line from the recruiters email: "This is the mother of all web programming jobs..."
My current job was also thru monster. Job #3 was going thru layoff hell and around a Wednesday evening I got hinted that I would be laid off that same Friday. Sometime around 2 AM on Thursday I applied to 13 jobs thru monster. That day around noon I was contacted directly by the company, and we interviewed over the phone for close to two hours. Friday was judgement day: layoff meetings thru the day, and none of us knew who would get hit. I interviewed at 9:30 AM and spent the morning interviewing, doing proficiency tests for SQL, etc. I took the metro across town to my job not knowing if I still had a job there. I was called in and told that I had been spared at the last second but that I had to prove my loyalty because things were rough and the survivors were going to take a 20% pay cut. I said sure, count me in.
That happened Friday at 3 PM. Monday morning I had a technical interview over the phone, but it was b/s: at 3 or so in the afternoon I got my offer letter fedexed. I accepted it on the spot and gave my company a one-week notice as a way to repay them for cutting my salary 20%.
BTW, that Friday one of my best friends got laid off. He had taken the afternoon off to go interview elsewhere, and they called him on his cell to fire him! The bastard beat me. He got *his* offer fedexed to him at least 3 hours before I got mine.
Online recruiting works, just make sure you don't fall for predatory recruiters, who are worse than used car salesmen. Monster needs to do a better job keeping these bastards from canvassing the system, because there is nothing more frustrating than recruiters calling every 15 minutes saying you are totally qualified to do the job they are hunting for, but then ask you what you do and if you can send them a resume.
If they are real customers of Monster they already have your resume, and they should know what you do and if you are experienced. Anyone that calls you and asks for a resume and doesnt have a clue is cold calling you and you should hang up on the spot.
Paranoia was one of the few RPGs we played in college (this is 1989-92) where pretty much everyone was happy. With AD&D, Mechwarrior, Battletech, Shadowrun and even Warhammer 40K we always had one or two disgruntled people. With Paranoia people literally fought to get into our games. The whole secret society angle by itself was priceless.
Just go with the truth. Anyone that has been around IT longer than a year knows that there is an artificial amount of turnaround due to the dot-com bubble blow up. It is incredibly rare to find IT people that have averaged more than 3 years per job.
The truth shall set you free. Polish up that resume and don't be embarrassed of your bad luck.
And here in North Virginia it is the opposite
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
Here all cars get tested every two years. After a certain age (it is either 20 or 25, too lazy to GIS) they won't bother testing.
If you have been using it for years then there is no way you can visualize my reaction to my first contact with it a year ago.
The main problem with people that, like me, are switching hats all the time is that anything that takes more than 5 minutes to figure out goes into the mythical "training to-do" list. That is of course the list of all the crap you want to look into whenever you have some breathing room from the hat-switching.
The other reason it is so easy to just take a look at Timbuk2 and push it aside for later is that it came bundled with our T1 router. Had we paid retail for it then we would be more urged to use it.
Our Netopia router came bundled with Timbuk2 but it was too complicated. As for VNC, I am not done messing with it yet.
BTW, I forgot to mention something really weird that the remote desktop client has been doing, and as far as I can tell it only happens with Panther, not with Jaguar:
Sometimes when I am copying text between the remote desktop client (connecting to Windows 2000 Server) and Panther it crashes both the remote desktop client and whatever OS X application I was copying from/to. It has happened with BBEdit Pro and MS Office v.X.
I program asp from OS X. There are only two things I cannot do with the mac itself:
1. Manage the SQL Servers we use 2. Manage the IIS Servers.
There are ODBC drivers for OSX but they cost a bundle, and there is nothing available to manage IIS from OSX. That leaves me four choices:
1. Tie up one of our scarce PCs (all our workstations are mac, windows is only used on a couple servers) just to manage IIS and SQL Server. That means spending precious time just keeping the machine patched just to do these two things. Plus it would take desk space (and my mac is a Powerbook, so I am used to have a relatively clean desk).
2. Walk to the windows servers any time I need to do something. Totally unpractical.
3. Use Terminal Server, since Microsoft provides a free Remote Desktop client. This works perfectly but it does not allow me to drag and drop between the terminal server session and my desktop.
4. Use VPC with 2000 Pro or XP Pro. This means I still have to spend a lot of time keeping windows patched properly, and it takes a lot more CPU power than a terminal services session. The only advantage here is I would get drag and drop.
I tried the VPC route for a while. On a Titanium Powerbook 867 it pretty bearable on Windows 2000 if I reserve 256MB ram for it. On XP Pro it is pretty much unusable unless I give it 384MB or more, which is not acceptable since that gives me 768MB ram for everything else.
Terminal Server is my only choice now, so instead of drag and drop I am stuck using samba shares, which would only work inside of the firewall and whenever I need to work away from the office I have to use ftp. Clumsy but gets the job done. If I was able to use drag and drop with Terminal Server it would totally rock. Patching the TS itself is not an issue since it is already being done, it would not mean extra work for me.
I kept VPC for a while rationalizing that I would not always have TS available, but then I realized that was just stupid since the server I would be managing *had* to be online and it is always setup in admin mode (with admin mode you cannot use it as an applications server, so TS is only used to manage the box).
As it is right now I have no interest in moving along with VPC, and all my peers that have faced the same dilemma agree.
My wife got me 3 bars and the first time I tried it I got a nasty buzz. It is actually a very nice soap even if not taking into account that it delivers as much caffeine as two cups of coffee with each shower.
It is not free, it is a bundle. That is why only people that paid for Panther are entitled to get it.
One of the reasons I did not complain about the $130 bump to Panther is that it came with a few things that, to me, made it worth it. Expose, iChatAV, and the newer Mail.app are three things I would have gladly paid extra, so in my personal situation the jump to 10.3 was maybe $50 and the other $80 was on the extra apps.
I will gladly pay the yearly $130 if it means I don't have to put up with the hassle of keeping windows running. I just reinstalled Panther on my Titanium Powerbook 867 and I probably spent more time copying my back up files than what it took me to do the clean install (I had used the upgrade option first). I did not even have to reinstall most of my software.
We got the Comcast PVR as soon as the trials started here. The remote control is cumbersome (and a cheaply built piece of crap), and the box will crash if you try to do too many things at the same time. It is also very sluggish once it is getting close to full. Except for these things, the box pretty much rocks. You can record anything except the on demand channels.
Another thing that can be a problem is that it only has two tuners, so if two channels are being recorded at the same time you are stuck watching one of the two.
The software interface is so-so, and it does not let you pick a show and remember to record it every day/week at the same time/channel. You can tell set it manually to do this, but it would be nice if you could just click on the show and have an option to record that same show once a week or whatever.
Ours takes a royal beating. Out of the 50 hours of programming my wife has at least 30 hours with kiddie programs for our son. He totally shreds to pieces VHS tapes and DVDs, so in a few months of having him just watch the PVR instead of tapes and DVDs we have saved a bundle.
It is very expensive, but to me a platinum package with Comcast (which includes all the on demand channels) plus the extra fee for the PVR is cheaper than what I was spending on Blockbuster late fees. I had Netflix for a couple years but now I prefer on demand.
As for service stability, the damn thing is rock solid. I have never been out of cable except for a couple hours during the last hurricane (I am in the DC metro area).
My main beef with Comcast is the issues with the non-published internet caps. If I only had to deal with them for digital cable I would be 110% pleased with them.
In one of his books one character says "do you know what I like to do when I am facing a problem that seems impossible to solve? I go to sleep. In the morning the problem is still there but at least I got a good night of sleep."
Sometimes you just have to step away from the problem for a little bit. Maybe take a little walk, or go grab some coffee. I have been stuck with a programming problem for hours and I have solved it before I even walk out of the building because that temporary distraction of the walk/coffee sort of cleared my thinking.
(some background at http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/com/an-msq -114.htm)
I had the pleasure of spending many a 12-hour shift manning a MSQ-114 terminal somewhere overseas while enlisted in the US Army. The 114 is pretty much a self enclosed Satellite NOC, designed as a in-theater ops center.
It consists of a trailer, about 2/3rds crammed with 19" racks with all the up/down converters, power meters, amplifiers, etc. necessary for the up/down link. The other 1/3rd is a tiny office where the two on-duty controllers do their jobs. There are desks at both sides of the tiny office, and the walls are covered with equipment too, so with two chairs there is not a hell of a lot of room if two tall guys pull the duty.
Any climate control in the unit is there for the confort of the equipment. That means that in the summer whatever time you are not spending to keep the satellite network running will be spent making sure the air conditioners won't die on you. If the AC dies, you are screwed.
In the winter the AC sort of works, but your heater won't. If you get a space heater then it is sort of bearable.
Towards the back of the equipment area of the trailer (which is about 40 feet or so long) there are a couple of ancient disk drives that weight 300 pounds and use platter cartridges. If you steep too hard on the floor, the hard disks will crash. If you crash the hard drive, it is *your* turn to get the dolly and the winch to replace the damn thing. Step lightly.
It is also loud as hell. There is zero noise insulation for the office side of the trailer, and you are listening to a couple dozen 19" racks being ventilated, plus the noise from the air conditioners. Not very good for your long term hearing.
We were slightly lucky. Ours had a little balcony in the back of the trailer, made out of steel and it had a roof. With this we got a 5-ton truck with a maintenance module/shelter/whatever connected to it, so we could walk out of the trailer and into the van to use the microwave or coffee pot or to use the benches to fix stuff. If the weather cooperated with us we could maybe grill some steaks.
At least there's one thing it fixes ...
on
iCal 1.5.2 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The iCal notifications got broken when I upgraded to Panther. This patch seems to have fixed the issue. I rember I went as far as emailing Apple to tell them about it, but no feedback whatsoever. I guess somebody was listening:-)
If your purchased product comes with a different feature, and it is better than what it should have been, then you are lucky. If it is the opposite, then this is a simple violation of truth in advertising laws. You are owed either a refund or an exchange so you can have the actual product for which you paid for.
There is no middle ground here, if the difference in the product does not make it better (like for example, if by mistake they give you a computer with a faster CPU or GPU than what you intended on purchasing) then it is *their* problem. They can sugar coat it all they want, but it is only a matter of hours until the first class action happens.
If they are smart they will try to exchange these products ASAP and hope the consumers will be happy with the replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
You can easily go around the new policy by getting them to acknowledge fair use. Your job requires timely access to these messages. Either they let you continue to use your personal cell (I use mine for the exact reason too, so I feel your pain) or then your effectiveness takes a hit. That is of course unless they are willing to get you a cheap cell phone that can receive text messages. Virgin Mobile prepaid cell phones start at $50 and the minimum usage is $20 every 90 days, which won't raise any eyebrows. Inbound SMS is free, outbound is 10 cents per message.
...
The thing to understand is that the company is entitled to set these rules. I have seen bus drivers steer with one hand while chatting in the cell, that is a no-no. At a previous job we had people that expected to be entitled to spend the day talking to their girlfriends on the cell all day. Others would bring their laptops and forget to patch and scan them before plugging in. And so it goes
At my current job I work from my personal laptop. The company provided me a Windows desktop but I elected to bring my own iBook and then later switched to a Powerbook. My boss understands that due to the nature of my work it is better for me to use that machine and move around with it, his only concern is that I must make sure my work files are kept in a network drive that is in the backups schedule. He is also concerned about theft, but the only real work material kept in the laptop is old emails and some perl scripts that would be useless to an outsider. If the laptop breaks (heaven forbid!) then I still have my work computer sitting there and I can use it while the powerbook is being repaired.
If they don't want to compromise, then walk.
You can't have any emotional ties with your employees. No friends, no family and specially no girlfriends. This is a company we are talking about, not a hobby.
There is nothing more painful than hiring a friend only to have to let her go because you cannot afford her anymore. It happened to me, and more than two years after I still feel guilty as hell. Even if she understood what was happening, and I had given her heads up a couple months in advance, it still affected the relationship.
What you need is a person to whom you are acquainted professionally, but not on a too close personal level. If you are running the company then basically you don't have friends there, period. This is why the girlfriend is a no-no. I have witnessed what happens when you break the "don't shit where you eat" rule, and it is not pretty.
The only place I have seen where something like that works remotely is because the CEO and President of the company are husband and wife and they hold stakes in the company. They are extremely careful to make sure there is a line drawn between their private and work lives, and we are never left feeling uncomfortable.
We also had married couples when I was in the Army, but 99% of the time the Army made sure they were sent to separate units. If in the same unit, then they were sent to opposite shifts.
The only place where I have seen families consistently succeeding in running a business together is in the food and service sectors. Little mom and pops usually run smoothly but only if the whole family supports the operation. There is a chain of restaurants in North Virginia, Joe's, that has the best inexpensive italian food in all of DC Metro. Small problem: if you want the best they have, then you can only go to the main restaurant location because that is where "Joe" and most of the kids hang out. The other locations have less of a family presence, so they lose some of the touch that drives us to come back time and again.
And of course, remember that girlfriends come and go, but family is forever. Maybe there is away you can make it work with your folks, but the girlfriend is a definitely no-no.
Very affordable concrete extrusion machines have been available for years to do smaller jobs like edging sidewalks and that kind of thing. I saw one that extrudes a neat little feet-tall wall (which does not have to be straight) for use in gardening and landscaping.
The way I see their only problems are the scale of the job itself and the proper characteristics of the extruded material so when it dries properly you are left with a strong structure.
I am 33. When I was 10 or 11 my aunt gave me two sets of encyclopedias. One was the standard Britannica-type collection, probably 30 volumes or so. The other one was broken down into subjects.
Problem #1: Both encyclopedias were published in Spain, and we lived in Puerto Rico, which is a US Commonwealth, so most of the political and cultural slant of both was aimed at Europeans and made a lot of the content very confusing.
Problem #2: These things take a long time to put together. By the time it goes on sale most of the content is a couple years old. All the machinery, cars, airplanes, inventions, etc. looked already outdated.
Problem #3 was the size, but that was the early 80's so it was not the end of the world. Back then we were used to the idea of having to lookup an index while now we expect all information to be one GIS away.
Encyclopedias are terribly outdated and are competing with free information resources that are up to date and more reliable. They are expensive and they take a lot of space.
The one thing I miss about them is that (at least both of mine) had some really kickass layered diagrams of cool stuff like nuclear reactors, car engines, a submarine, etc. The diagrams were printed on clear plastic and as you leafed thru it you would go deeper into the workings of the machine. Now of course we can have something like a QTVR movie or a Flash animation to do much better, but for many years that was the only way to go.
You just need to remove the rear part of the convertible top. Not that you need to do that, since most routine maintenance points are located elsewhere in the car.
As for removing the engine, the car was designed from day zero so removing the engine could be done without much hassle. Of course, it sucks that you cannot show off the engine, but let's be realistic, none of the Porsche engines have much to show. The engines on the 911/996 series are covered with fans and junk, and the engines in the Cayenne have moldings all over.
Now, lemme tell you about something retarded. My last 3 cars were different generations of the Mazda Miata/MX-5/Eunos roadster. Both the Mk.1 and Mk.2 have the battery (a space saver gel battery about half as big as a normal battery) is located on the right rear fender. Mk.1 have it inside of the fender itself, while the MK.2 has it under the trunk space level. They did this mostly for balance. You can change the battery in a minute or two, just like every other car I have owned in my life. So I was a bit spoiled about how easy it is to change a car battery.
That is, until the Dodge.
My wife drives a 1997 Dodge Stratus. The battery finally gave away the ghost, but for the couple years we had it so far I had never seen the battery. Where the battery is usually located it has two bright plastic caps for contact points in case you need to jump start. One is red, the other black, pretty straightforward.
The battery is nowhere to be seen.
I am a mechanical engineer by training and a car nut, so I felt very embarrassed to have to spend more than one minute looking for something so damn big! Eventually I found it. It was crammed inside the front half of the front left fender well. The fender well had a faint outline of a battery. That meant the fender well had to be removed to have access to the battery.
Small problem. The wheel is in the way! To hell with it, I drove to a car/tire store and they quoted me $50 for a new battery, installed. I asked 3 times just to be safe. They kept saying $50, so I said sure. The way I see it I'll pay $10 for the battery and $40 for the amusement of watching some poor bastard try to change my battery.
The job took at least 30 minutes, of which 15 were wasted by the mechanic trying to find out where the battery was located at. The other 15 went into putting the car in a lift to remove the wheel so the battery could be switched. Ouch.
THAT to me is worse than the stupid hood being welded shut.
Please mod up the above comment. The reason MS invested the $150 million was to prove they were not trying to crush Apple. Apple was of course hurting, but it was a PR move on MS's part, not some obscure evil plan to take them over, crush them, etc.
The only thing Apple was guilty in the $150 million mess was to project Bill Gates on a giant screen for the announcement: it was too much like the 1984 commercial!
They also work well on older versions of Windows, since the card did most of the hard work you never really needed a very strong PC. We were doing satellite network analysis on a P133 with a little bit of ram and it ran beautifully, and this was on VB6 which was super bloated!
That sounds about right, I was stationed in Landstuhl (in Kaiserslautern) in '93-'97 and our HP Spectrum Analyzers were $60K or worse.
We also were tempted to jam the satellites but the problem was that the guy at DISA that ran the SATCOM network was a legendary ass and it was not worth the trouble to mess with him. His teletype initials were "HB" which we interpreted for "Hairy Balls."
DRMO = Defense Reutilization Marketing Office
This is the military agency that sells surplus equipment to the public. They usually have stuff like what you need.
If you can find something that has a HPIB/GPIB bus connector (IEEE-488) then you can connect it to a PC and use program your own interface (the libraries are very simple and very well documented). We did this both in the Army and also at a commercial satellite communications company (ours was to interface with HP spectrum analyzers thru IEEE-488).
If you want a babe magnet, get a 12" iBook G4. Girls find it irresistible. Buy a Powerbook and all you will attract is going to be nerds. Why do you think the iBook looks like a chiclet?
Every job I have held since I finished my US Army enlistment has been found thru either Monster (or their predecessor, OCC) or Cyber Coders.
..."
I got my first civilian job thru OCC while I was still in Germany (I had to hop on a C141 MAC flight to DC for the interview, it was a blast!). I got my second civilian job thru monster. The first code I wrote for them was, check this out, an online jobs site!
My third job was thru Cybercoders. That one was really neat, I still remember the subject line from the recruiters email: "This is the mother of all web programming jobs
My current job was also thru monster. Job #3 was going thru layoff hell and around a Wednesday evening I got hinted that I would be laid off that same Friday. Sometime around 2 AM on Thursday I applied to 13 jobs thru monster. That day around noon I was contacted directly by the company, and we interviewed over the phone for close to two hours. Friday was judgement day: layoff meetings thru the day, and none of us knew who would get hit. I interviewed at 9:30 AM and spent the morning interviewing, doing proficiency tests for SQL, etc. I took the metro across town to my job not knowing if I still had a job there. I was called in and told that I had been spared at the last second but that I had to prove my loyalty because things were rough and the survivors were going to take a 20% pay cut. I said sure, count me in.
That happened Friday at 3 PM. Monday morning I had a technical interview over the phone, but it was b/s: at 3 or so in the afternoon I got my offer letter fedexed. I accepted it on the spot and gave my company a one-week notice as a way to repay them for cutting my salary 20%.
BTW, that Friday one of my best friends got laid off. He had taken the afternoon off to go interview elsewhere, and they called him on his cell to fire him! The bastard beat me. He got *his* offer fedexed to him at least 3 hours before I got mine.
Online recruiting works, just make sure you don't fall for predatory recruiters, who are worse than used car salesmen. Monster needs to do a better job keeping these bastards from canvassing the system, because there is nothing more frustrating than recruiters calling every 15 minutes saying you are totally qualified to do the job they are hunting for, but then ask you what you do and if you can send them a resume.
If they are real customers of Monster they already have your resume, and they should know what you do and if you are experienced. Anyone that calls you and asks for a resume and doesnt have a clue is cold calling you and you should hang up on the spot.
Paranoia was one of the few RPGs we played in college (this is 1989-92) where pretty much everyone was happy. With AD&D, Mechwarrior, Battletech, Shadowrun and even Warhammer 40K we always had one or two disgruntled people. With Paranoia people literally fought to get into our games. The whole secret society angle by itself was priceless.
Just go with the truth. Anyone that has been around IT longer than a year knows that there is an artificial amount of turnaround due to the dot-com bubble blow up. It is incredibly rare to find IT people that have averaged more than 3 years per job.
The truth shall set you free. Polish up that resume and don't be embarrassed of your bad luck.
Here all cars get tested every two years. After a certain age (it is either 20 or 25, too lazy to GIS) they won't bother testing.
If you have been using it for years then there is no way you can visualize my reaction to my first contact with it a year ago.
The main problem with people that, like me, are switching hats all the time is that anything that takes more than 5 minutes to figure out goes into the mythical "training to-do" list. That is of course the list of all the crap you want to look into whenever you have some breathing room from the hat-switching.
The other reason it is so easy to just take a look at Timbuk2 and push it aside for later is that it came bundled with our T1 router. Had we paid retail for it then we would be more urged to use it.
Our Netopia router came bundled with Timbuk2 but it was too complicated. As for VNC, I am not done messing with it yet.
BTW, I forgot to mention something really weird that the remote desktop client has been doing, and as far as I can tell it only happens with Panther, not with Jaguar:
Sometimes when I am copying text between the remote desktop client (connecting to Windows 2000 Server) and Panther it crashes both the remote desktop client and whatever OS X application I was copying from/to. It has happened with BBEdit Pro and MS Office v.X.
I program asp from OS X. There are only two things I cannot do with the mac itself:
1. Manage the SQL Servers we use
2. Manage the IIS Servers.
There are ODBC drivers for OSX but they cost a bundle, and there is nothing available to manage IIS from OSX. That leaves me four choices:
1. Tie up one of our scarce PCs (all our workstations are mac, windows is only used on a couple servers) just to manage IIS and SQL Server. That means spending precious time just keeping the machine patched just to do these two things. Plus it would take desk space (and my mac is a Powerbook, so I am used to have a relatively clean desk).
2. Walk to the windows servers any time I need to do something. Totally unpractical.
3. Use Terminal Server, since Microsoft provides a free Remote Desktop client. This works perfectly but it does not allow me to drag and drop between the terminal server session and my desktop.
4. Use VPC with 2000 Pro or XP Pro. This means I still have to spend a lot of time keeping windows patched properly, and it takes a lot more CPU power than a terminal services session. The only advantage here is I would get drag and drop.
I tried the VPC route for a while. On a Titanium Powerbook 867 it pretty bearable on Windows 2000 if I reserve 256MB ram for it. On XP Pro it is pretty much unusable unless I give it 384MB or more, which is not acceptable since that gives me 768MB ram for everything else.
Terminal Server is my only choice now, so instead of drag and drop I am stuck using samba shares, which would only work inside of the firewall and whenever I need to work away from the office I have to use ftp. Clumsy but gets the job done. If I was able to use drag and drop with Terminal Server it would totally rock. Patching the TS itself is not an issue since it is already being done, it would not mean extra work for me.
I kept VPC for a while rationalizing that I would not always have TS available, but then I realized that was just stupid since the server I would be managing *had* to be online and it is always setup in admin mode (with admin mode you cannot use it as an applications server, so TS is only used to manage the box).
As it is right now I have no interest in moving along with VPC, and all my peers that have faced the same dilemma agree.
Yeah, from ThinkGeek.
My wife got me 3 bars and the first time I tried it I got a nasty buzz. It is actually a very nice soap even if not taking into account that it delivers as much caffeine as two cups of coffee with each shower.
It is not free, it is a bundle. That is why only people that paid for Panther are entitled to get it.
One of the reasons I did not complain about the $130 bump to Panther is that it came with a few things that, to me, made it worth it. Expose, iChatAV, and the newer Mail.app are three things I would have gladly paid extra, so in my personal situation the jump to 10.3 was maybe $50 and the other $80 was on the extra apps.
I will gladly pay the yearly $130 if it means I don't have to put up with the hassle of keeping windows running. I just reinstalled Panther on my Titanium Powerbook 867 and I probably spent more time copying my back up files than what it took me to do the clean install (I had used the upgrade option first). I did not even have to reinstall most of my software.
We got the Comcast PVR as soon as the trials started here. The remote control is cumbersome (and a cheaply built piece of crap), and the box will crash if you try to do too many things at the same time. It is also very sluggish once it is getting close to full. Except for these things, the box pretty much rocks. You can record anything except the on demand channels.
Another thing that can be a problem is that it only has two tuners, so if two channels are being recorded at the same time you are stuck watching one of the two.
The software interface is so-so, and it does not let you pick a show and remember to record it every day/week at the same time/channel. You can tell set it manually to do this, but it would be nice if you could just click on the show and have an option to record that same show once a week or whatever.
Ours takes a royal beating. Out of the 50 hours of programming my wife has at least 30 hours with kiddie programs for our son. He totally shreds to pieces VHS tapes and DVDs, so in a few months of having him just watch the PVR instead of tapes and DVDs we have saved a bundle.
It is very expensive, but to me a platinum package with Comcast (which includes all the on demand channels) plus the extra fee for the PVR is cheaper than what I was spending on Blockbuster late fees. I had Netflix for a couple years but now I prefer on demand.
As for service stability, the damn thing is rock solid. I have never been out of cable except for a couple hours during the last hurricane (I am in the DC metro area).
My main beef with Comcast is the issues with the non-published internet caps. If I only had to deal with them for digital cable I would be 110% pleased with them.
In one of his books one character says "do you know what I like to do when I am facing a problem that seems impossible to solve? I go to sleep. In the morning the problem is still there but at least I got a good night of sleep."
Sometimes you just have to step away from the problem for a little bit. Maybe take a little walk, or go grab some coffee. I have been stuck with a programming problem for hours and I have solved it before I even walk out of the building because that temporary distraction of the walk/coffee sort of cleared my thinking.
(some background at http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/com/an-msq -114.htm)
I had the pleasure of spending many a 12-hour shift manning a MSQ-114 terminal somewhere overseas while enlisted in the US Army. The 114 is pretty much a self enclosed Satellite NOC, designed as a in-theater ops center.
It consists of a trailer, about 2/3rds crammed with 19" racks with all the up/down converters, power meters, amplifiers, etc. necessary for the up/down link. The other 1/3rd is a tiny office where the two on-duty controllers do their jobs. There are desks at both sides of the tiny office, and the walls are covered with equipment too, so with two chairs there is not a hell of a lot of room if two tall guys pull the duty.
Any climate control in the unit is there for the confort of the equipment. That means that in the summer whatever time you are not spending to keep the satellite network running will be spent making sure the air conditioners won't die on you. If the AC dies, you are screwed.
In the winter the AC sort of works, but your heater won't. If you get a space heater then it is sort of bearable.
Towards the back of the equipment area of the trailer (which is about 40 feet or so long) there are a couple of ancient disk drives that weight 300 pounds and use platter cartridges. If you steep too hard on the floor, the hard disks will crash. If you crash the hard drive, it is *your* turn to get the dolly and the winch to replace the damn thing. Step lightly.
It is also loud as hell. There is zero noise insulation for the office side of the trailer, and you are listening to a couple dozen 19" racks being ventilated, plus the noise from the air conditioners. Not very good for your long term hearing.
We were slightly lucky. Ours had a little balcony in the back of the trailer, made out of steel and it had a roof. With this we got a 5-ton truck with a maintenance module/shelter/whatever connected to it, so we could walk out of the trailer and into the van to use the microwave or coffee pot or to use the benches to fix stuff. If the weather cooperated with us we could maybe grill some steaks.
The iCal notifications got broken when I upgraded to Panther. This patch seems to have fixed the issue. I rember I went as far as emailing Apple to tell them about it, but no feedback whatsoever. I guess somebody was listening :-)
My first reaction was that it is a bit too early for April Fool's jokes.
If your purchased product comes with a different feature, and it is better than what it should have been, then you are lucky. If it is the opposite, then this is a simple violation of truth in advertising laws. You are owed either a refund or an exchange so you can have the actual product for which you paid for.
There is no middle ground here, if the difference in the product does not make it better (like for example, if by mistake they give you a computer with a faster CPU or GPU than what you intended on purchasing) then it is *their* problem. They can sugar coat it all they want, but it is only a matter of hours until the first class action happens.
If they are smart they will try to exchange these products ASAP and hope the consumers will be happy with the replacement.