Are you still a geek? Do you still enjoy studying and reading everything tech with the resources to try them out? Then IT/Development is still probably where you want to be.
As a manager, you will still need to keep updated on new technology, but you will probably start taking a different (bird's eye) view to necessitate the distillation of all the new tasks you will need to juggle. Eventually, your ideas of implementation details will drift away as others will worry about them.
So you really need to look at yourself and decide what your goals are; and we aren't just talking career-wise. If you intend on raising a family, chances are you won't have the time to dedicate anymore to geek studies.
It is interesting that HIPAA abolished all references to SSNs in medical data. Member IDs used to be commonly be based on socials pre-2004 or so, when they were promptly changed to different identifiers; all with their own scheme per-healthplan. Based on the speed of health care innovation, it seems like for once every one else must catch up.
I just downloaded all the stuff. It looks like their development platform was the Atari ST, which has good emulators out there. They not only included the games, they included the development tools for the ST, as well as NTSC and PAL 7800 OS ROMs!
Often when I reach the state you've described, it can mean I am over-complicating the solution I am working on. For instance, maybe you are trying to implement something complex, but already provided in your software stack or a free library. For instance, maybe you are trying to parse text files by hand when a regex might be more appropriate.
If you have a lot of projects going on, task switching to something else often will give me an epiphany about something completely unrelated.
Sometimes, the solution to a complex problem can come in a dream too. Once in a while I'll start seeing data structures in a way that makes a lot more sense and the code to match will follow naturally the next day.
I'll go one more. I've already moved a couple of projects to VS 2010 to use Parallel.For(); when parsing and creating large text files. Previously, I was using the Task Parallel Library CTP for this in VS 2008. It's super fast on a Quad-Core PC.
I've looked into Berkley DB. It is a great engine, but the issue still exists where if you are not familiar with the application that is using it, you're out of luck. Maybe it has changed since when I looked, but the application handles its own metadata and must enforce its own relations if you need any referential integrity.
is not so much working with these databases as a programmer. Given time, a programmer could always work out the data scheme. The trouble ensues when an Analyst tries to get at the data with a report writer and stumbles trying to get the data. A lot of commercial software which uses these embedded databases will include its own reporting tools to mitigate the issue though.
For a while now, the browser dlls which are needed for rendering are decoupled from the browser itself. For instance, Windows Help and Visual Studio use an embedded browser control which is in essence really IE.
I really doubt that they will give you the option of changing the HTML renderer for Help and other things which use the embedded control. I think the real news here is that other options may exist for not just a default web browser, but to remove the option of IE altogether. It would be more of an IT support boon than a power user boon, because users can't use IE as a crutch if you wanted to make them use only Mozilla or Chrome, etc...
I've never had trouble canceling an XBOX account. I just did it last week. True that there is no option *on* the XBOX, but a simple five minute phone call (very late in the evening, even) was all it took.
We scan claim forms at my work and the Dot Matrix print is the hardest on OCR. If it is just for reading though, it is a great idea. The human brain is good at filling in blank spots.
I actually wrote my share of obfuscated CBM BASIC. With the silly notion that some day I might sell some of my code, I would put REM statements randomly on certain line numbers with control codes in them. This would cause the interpreter to fail with a '?SYNTAX ERROR' when doing a 'LIST'. With that hack in place, you would have to 'LIST' a specific line number to see it.
would probably be difficult nowadays to find someone to give you a UUCP connection, but back in the day it would queue up e-mail and usenet news to be transferred according to a schedule and not on-demand as most internet connections are now.
Although I prefer SFTP because the exchange is secure as well as the contents, I've run into the scenario more than once where the other end either does not understand how to use SFTP or prefers to encrypt the files themselves instead.
PGP (or GPG for a free option) will allow you to encrypt any file before sending it. It also has the added benefit of only encrypting the file with the public key of your intended recipient. That way, even if a man-in-the middle grabs your file stream or hacks the FTP server, your file is still relatively safe.
For the sound engineer, this debate goes even farther than the commercials they compress to sound louder on TV.
There is a plethora of sound processing equipment which psycho-acoustically "improves" the original recording. The real debate here is over whether dynamic range is noticeable vs. being able to hear everything at the same -maximized- audio level.
In recording college we took the same course (mandatory) from two different music producers. One from the mic-everything-so-you-can-hear-it-all-and-control- the-volume and the other from the distance-mic-it-all-with-as-few-mics-as-possible camp.
Personally, I like the latter. If you have a good sound source to begin with and the band does not suck, why not let people hear what they *really* sound like, instead of making the drums pan all over your speakers rather than wave through them as they would if you were sitting in front of them. For some productions, it actually adds to the artistic drama to have everything sound different than if played live. This can be a good thing, but if you want a band (or any kind of event or sound source for that matter) to be able to stand on its own, then why not present it to the listener as the full experience you get right in front of the band?
I'm digressing from the original subject, bust I just wanted to give another angle to the debate.
SSDs have been available for a while, but not for the typical consumer. They are available more for enterprise tasks such as decreasing the delay for a SQL server to hit it's disks for data.
This excites me, because this technology will be more affordable for the small-medium business file/database/web servers.
Except for the fact that the Sound Pressure Level of a Decibel doubles every 3db. I'm no match major, but that makes the difference between 20db and 60db very significant. Still, nowhere near the human ear pain/damage threshold of about 120db.
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Are you still a geek? Do you still enjoy studying and reading everything tech with the resources to try them out? Then IT/Development is still probably where you want to be.
As a manager, you will still need to keep updated on new technology, but you will probably start taking a different (bird's eye) view to necessitate the distillation of all the new tasks you will need to juggle. Eventually, your ideas of implementation details will drift away as others will worry about them.
So you really need to look at yourself and decide what your goals are; and we aren't just talking career-wise. If you intend on raising a family, chances are you won't have the time to dedicate anymore to geek studies.
It is interesting that HIPAA abolished all references to SSNs in medical data. Member IDs used to be commonly be based on socials pre-2004 or so, when they were promptly changed to different identifiers; all with their own scheme per-healthplan. Based on the speed of health care innovation, it seems like for once every one else must catch up.
I just downloaded all the stuff. It looks like their development platform was the Atari ST, which has good emulators out there. They not only included the games, they included the development tools for the ST, as well as NTSC and PAL 7800 OS ROMs!
Often when I reach the state you've described, it can mean I am over-complicating the solution I am working on. For instance, maybe you are trying to implement something complex, but already provided in your software stack or a free library. For instance, maybe you are trying to parse text files by hand when a regex might be more appropriate.
If you have a lot of projects going on, task switching to something else often will give me an epiphany about something completely unrelated.
Sometimes, the solution to a complex problem can come in a dream too. Once in a while I'll start seeing data structures in a way that makes a lot more sense and the code to match will follow naturally the next day.
This is typical of a con. You "made" them by asking questions. They are not looking for smart people. :)
Well, I doubt they were shot right way. The shark was just seeing no ROI.
I'll go one more. I've already moved a couple of projects to VS 2010 to use Parallel.For(); when parsing and creating large text files. Previously, I was using the Task Parallel Library CTP for this in VS 2008. It's super fast on a Quad-Core PC.
I've looked into Berkley DB. It is a great engine, but the issue still exists where if you are not familiar with the application that is using it, you're out of luck. Maybe it has changed since when I looked, but the application handles its own metadata and must enforce its own relations if you need any referential integrity.
is not so much working with these databases as a programmer. Given time, a programmer could always work out the data scheme. The trouble ensues when an Analyst tries to get at the data with a report writer and stumbles trying to get the data. A lot of commercial software which uses these embedded databases will include its own reporting tools to mitigate the issue though.
For a while now, the browser dlls which are needed for rendering are decoupled from the browser itself. For instance, Windows Help and Visual Studio use an embedded browser control which is in essence really IE.
I really doubt that they will give you the option of changing the HTML renderer for Help and other things which use the embedded control. I think the real news here is that other options may exist for not just a default web browser, but to remove the option of IE altogether. It would be more of an IT support boon than a power user boon, because users can't use IE as a crutch if you wanted to make them use only Mozilla or Chrome, etc...
I've never had trouble canceling an XBOX account. I just did it last week. True that there is no option *on* the XBOX, but a simple five minute phone call (very late in the evening, even) was all it took.
I'd have to second that. The database format in Notes does not adhere to the concept of tables having primary/foreign key relationships.
We scan claim forms at my work and the Dot Matrix print is the hardest on OCR. If it is just for reading though, it is a great idea. The human brain is good at filling in blank spots.
I actually wrote my share of obfuscated CBM BASIC. With the silly notion that some day I might sell some of my code, I would put REM statements randomly on certain line numbers with control codes in them. This would cause the interpreter to fail with a '?SYNTAX ERROR' when doing a 'LIST'. With that hack in place, you would have to 'LIST' a specific line number to see it.
would probably be difficult nowadays to find someone to give you a UUCP connection, but back in the day it would queue up e-mail and usenet news to be transferred according to a schedule and not on-demand as most internet connections are now.
Although I prefer SFTP because the exchange is secure as well as the contents, I've run into the scenario more than once where the other end either does not understand how to use SFTP or prefers to encrypt the files themselves instead.
PGP (or GPG for a free option) will allow you to encrypt any file before sending it. It also has the added benefit of only encrypting the file with the public key of your intended recipient. That way, even if a man-in-the middle grabs your file stream or hacks the FTP server, your file is still relatively safe.
It actually sounds like the author spent too much time doing DOS and Win32 programming and hasn't woken up to the, actualy refreshing, .NET paradigm.
Wow. Six months' time wasted on years worth of APIs. What a complete waste of time. :)
Did you ever think it might help you guys internally at Microsoft to be doing this as well?
On the flipside, Microsoft is offering some pretty good Unix interoperability suport in Vista/Server 2008 as well.
They give you a full POSIX environment, CSH, KSH, BASH, and gcc plus X11. It is an optional component, but free to install.
4. Profit!
After reading about the MD5 and SHA vulnerabilities, I've been looking to Tiger as a hash algorithm. Anyone else have experience with it?
:)
Let the "You should really check out the new Leopard algorithm" jokes fly..
4. Profit!
For the sound engineer, this debate goes even farther than the commercials they compress to sound louder on TV.
- the-volume and the other from the distance-mic-it-all-with-as-few-mics-as-possible camp.
There is a plethora of sound processing equipment which psycho-acoustically "improves" the original recording. The real debate here is over whether dynamic range is noticeable vs. being able to hear everything at the same -maximized- audio level.
In recording college we took the same course (mandatory) from two different music producers. One from the mic-everything-so-you-can-hear-it-all-and-control
Personally, I like the latter. If you have a good sound source to begin with and the band does not suck, why not let people hear what they *really* sound like, instead of making the drums pan all over your speakers rather than wave through them as they would if you were sitting in front of them. For some productions, it actually adds to the artistic drama to have everything sound different than if played live. This can be a good thing, but if you want a band (or any kind of event or sound source for that matter) to be able to stand on its own, then why not present it to the listener as the full experience you get right in front of the band?
I'm digressing from the original subject, bust I just wanted to give another angle to the debate.
SSDs have been available for a while, but not for the typical consumer. They are available more for enterprise tasks such as decreasing the delay for a SQL server to hit it's disks for data.
This excites me, because this technology will be more affordable for the small-medium business file/database/web servers.
Except for the fact that the Sound Pressure Level of a Decibel doubles every 3db. I'm no match major, but that makes the difference between 20db and 60db very significant. Still, nowhere near the human ear pain/damage threshold of about 120db.