We are using an idea like this at my shop. We are about 10 people and I run the tech, if we were bigger it probably would not work. I don't lock boxes down. We let people who want to pick out what they work with, you want a desktop with 3 monitors? Sure. A 17" laptop? Sure. A great travel 15" laptop, fine. Mac Pro? No problem. And when asked, "Can I install X, Y, Z on it?" Sure, it's yours basically, do whatever you'd like with it. And when you have problems we'll try and help you fix YOUR machine, while we are blowing it away and resetting it up YOU can use this old machine for 2 days. It's a tool to do your job, do what you want with it.
Basically I've found that if you have them think of that machine as theirs, they treat it better. So instead of their mindset being, "Well, I'll just download this, my antivirus will stop me if it's bad and IT can deal with it" They have been thinking, "It's probably not worth messing with, I don't want to screw up MY computer."
Like I said, we are willing to help them, but I tell them straight up that it is their laptop/desktop to use. When some people leave we've just let them take their old laptop with them. I mean, they picked it out, it's got the stuff they want on it, and it's 2 years old, take it. The new guy will want to pick his own stuff out.
If we grew much bigger though we'd need more in the line of policy.
I've looked around, I haven't seen any information about a new AirRave this year. Do you have more information on it? Or could you point me in that direction good sir? What I really want is to just be able to buy a box, plug it in, and boom, instant bars. The Network Extender I have for my Verizon phone is like that, it's wonderful!
I've gotta give the nod to Picasa. Free and easy to use. The ONLY drawback I've had with it is reading mp4 video files (which my Sony camera takes). I had to install a codec pack to force windows to make thumbnails and then Picasa would recognize them. Aside from that it has all the fun home features you need, auto face recognition and nice easy ways to do things in bulk.
I use dropbox for sort of the same reason. I've also found that it's replaced my thumb drive and ftp server to some degree. If I have mp3s at home and I want to bring them to work, or vice versa, I just drop box 'em. It really is a lot easier then actually having to manage your data. It's also been handy if I have a friend I want to share a doc with that I update a lot, ala RockBand "These are the songs I have".xls Being that drop box allows you to give an http readonly link to your file on the cloud. And up to 2 gigs free! It's sweet.
Glad you liked it! The ticket system has been a HUGE help for us. I'll go to a meeting and be asked, "Did you guys fix that spreadsheet bug we talked about last week?" "Oh, man, I'm sorry I forgot. Can you put that in as a ticket for us?" It's not that I want to be a dick about stuff but we really depend on stuff getting into the ticket system for tracking. If they can't put the effort in to make a ticket I certainly can't be bothered to work on it. That way they also know when we've done the request. I also write a weekly report for my boss with a quick 1 liner for each open ticket in the system/any ticket that has been closed in the last week. It's become so that anybody working here knows if they have something they really want to get attention, make it a ticket. It will be reviewed for certain. Sure, you can send us a mail and we might do it but hey, we have a ticket system so if you feel strongly about getting something worked on put it in there.
Internally for our group we only make tickets for each other if it's something we want to document. "Andy, please fix the blown up script on server 5 again" That way when he does and closes the ticket he'll tie it to source control and write what he did to fix it, that way anybody here can fix server 5 when perl blows up on it if he's on vacation. Having good docs like that only save us time down the road. No more, "Remember when we had this problem last year? uh.. remember how that took 2 days to figure out.. what did we do again? Did Bill fix it?" Just do a quick search through the tickets and boom. It's like you get self building docs.
I run a small dev team for a company of 12 people. 2 of us are 'senior' dev guys, 1 is a graphics guy in marketing, and the 4th is a guy still in school. The rest are professional services or customer reps. My company does web crawling (lots of SQL, perl, automation) and then some web stuff to display the results and various reports. Pretty much I meet with the owner once a week and we make sure we are on the same page as to what the big projects we are working on (more news coverage, some cool new chart system, etc.) then we have a really quick tech huddle every morning at 9:00. Pretty much roll your chair over and we all look at the whiteboard, what did you do yesterday, what are we working on today. Are we on track to get X done for Monday? And y done for next Monday? Every piece of every project is on the board assigned to somebody. We use source control and have a ticket system, here's a good example of how we worked on a recent project together.
We needed to write a new mail system. We mail out a few thousand reports a day to clients but our old one was prone to errors and failures. I work mostly with SQL, perl, and architecture, I suck at web/interface stuff. I know enough about it to throw a table up but it is ugly. The other senior guy is great at interface stuff, slick javascripty boxes and he's OK with backend stuff but it's never optimized and will bog down. We know what each other is good at and we like it that way! So I sat down in a conference room with my senior guy and we mapped out how to do this. A queue system, this talks to this, we need a template here, this should be stored in a db, this should be in the code, etc. Broke it all down into pieces. I took on the details loading up of the queue system, the other guy took on the reading out of the queue to send the mails. With that he gave the graphics guy the task of "Write up all the CSS to make 4 templates of daily reports, make them look cool". He would then take that CSS and dump it into the mailing code he had written. I had our Jr. guy write internal reporting of the queuing system to track when mails go out and an internal dashboard of it.
Once it was decided what we were doing nobody had to waste time in meetings or anything, just needed to talk once in a while, "Hey, I'm going to put this flag in the queue tell you which template to use, how do you want to receive it on your end?" Each piece of the project is compartmentalized, I don't even need to think, "gee, I hope the graphics line up" or "Oh man, I'll need to write an internal report for this", it's all been delegated. I just do my part, everybody does there's and when it's all done we test and I just make sure the end product is solid. "Ok, reports going out now? I'll reboot the mail server, let's see if we lose any repots, the queue handles that right?" Not having to worry about all the details makes doing my part much easier. I worried about the details when we designed it, so now it's just getting it done. In the end I'm the director and it's up to me to make sure it's done but I act a lot more like a peer as I do as much work as the other guys, but I also handle all the meetings with the other groups. My team can focus on code and banging that project out while I deal with any BS that would just slow the team down. I've found this is a huge help on moral, how bad is it when the marketing guy wants his cake and eat it too and then the whole dev team just goes back to there desk and bitches about it. Instead I just go to the meeting 1 on 1 and will say, "I think you just wanted to cake here, no eating." That way he doesn't look silly and I can go back to my team and say, "Ok, we are baking a cake." and there is no confusion. I'd say half of being a good dev leader is understand wtf the people really want (not what they ask for) and then translating that to the rest of the dev guys, "Hey, let's be solution providers, not coders."
I've found using a ticket system is helpful for people outside my department for putting requests in, for
I've been playing poker as a hobby for several years and recently at work I had a time when I was pretty unhappy. I started as a PC desk jockey->server guy->scripter->application guy->dba->manager->? over 10 years. So I too felt that I had sort of done it all and was thinking of going pro poker. I had a long talk with my wife (and we have a daughter) and a full time poker pro I'm friends with and it made me realize that it is also another job with all it's ++ and --. But I wanted to put some real effort into this and started playing every weekend (basically part time job) and all of a sudden it was a job and I while I would be playing poker I actually started to think, "I wish I was back at work." We then had some personal changes at work and all of a sudden, work was great!
It turned out that my current work environment had changed and that's what was dragging me down. With the new personal and actually getting to play with the 'greener grass' at the poker table I was reinvigorated and excited about computers once again. Just like everybody else here is saying, you need some kind of break and not just a 1 week vacation. Get really serious about another hobby, and either: end up making that your job, or come around and get back to your old job.
Believe me, having a family makes it tough. But you've gotta try some things so you'll be happy (and in turn the family is happy) with minimal risk to them. Everyone gets tired of being on the same scene after a while. Heck, I'm sure porn stars hate going to work after a while.
I've used this service to grab a album for $9. Seemed perfectly fair to me. When I buy albums now I get the disc, rip it, put a copy on my laptop, one on my desktop, and one on my ipod and basically just toss the CD into a pile. This is much more convenient and seems reasonably priced compared to the $14 I would expect at Best Buy. High quality, 'cheap', and a fast download, that's what I want.
It's the same reason I used to use allofmp3. I would actually be at work thinking of an album I had at home and would just go spend the $2 to download it instead of waiting to go home and rip it. To further express how lazy I have been, I've actually been at my desk at home, knew I had an album in my pile of disks that I wanted to rip but just went to allofmp3 and downloaded it for $1.50 instead. I mean, come on, that's pretty lazy. My thought process was along the lines of, "Well, by the time I find it, rip and, tag it, and get it loaded I could be listening to it AND I don't even have to get up... yah.. here is my $1.50!"
And this is what we do every winter, pay a plumber (about $75) to drain your pipes. He'll put anti freeze in the places he can't drain (say the toilets). You could drain the house on your own but you want to pay somebody else that has the insurance to cover in case there is a problem. Another thing we do is call a neighbor that is up there 1 time during the winter and ask them to walk around outside after a storm. If you are in an area that could be damaged by wind (say ocean front, or heavey woods) you may want to put up some plywood over any expensive windows, but as long as the water is off you'll be ok even if a window does get broken. My only other small tip is if you have wooden window sills (on the inside) is to cover them with some newpaper. I know it sounds silly but direct sun on those will cause them to fade over the years, and you can save them a bit with some protection while your away for a long stretch. If you do that and come back in 5 months, the paper will be all yellow and beat, just think what damage it slowly does to your sills! The last thing to do when you leave is shut off your house breaker and any heat (like a furnace). No electricity = no weird electric short causing a fire. Or if there were something crazy happen that damaged your house at least there won't be electrcity going to start a fire. Over all, call a local plumber and he should tell you all the above stuff. It's really pretty simple.
I've read a bunch of these tech responses and come on people.. these are solutions far more complicated then needs be. I know this is a question being posted on/. but most New England summer rental property has this issue, and they don't put up a web cam with apache to solve it. Sometimes the best solution is the easy one. Anyways, good luck!
We started using a Mirra box a year or so ago at work. It's a really really easy box to setup: plug in power, plug in network cable, turn on, put CD into the machine you want backed up, click next a bunch, magic. It's pretty cheap ($300?), has 150gb of space, automated, has version control, and you can access your backups from anywhere. It really is as easy as they say. We've been using with about 10 people in the office with no problems, http://www.mirra.com/. I think it also runs some form of Linux if you wanted to hook a keyboard up to it and see what's going on.
However I don't want to chuck $300 for a home backup box, so what I do with my 30gig 'collection' of junk is run a script to another drive. I just have a big 'ole 120gig drive and everyday a batch file kicks off, xcopy/d to this other drive. Works great for me!
I'd have to agree. I look at it like buying music CDs. I used to buy a CD for $15, but then I found Napster, and then peer to peer, but it became a hassle and I didn't want to put the time in. Then there was Itunes, but the price was about the same as just buying the CD. Then I found (on Slashdot) http://www.allofmp3.com./ I don't mind paying for the stuff, I just don't want to spend a lot, or have it be a hassle, there has to be a happy medium for movies. I think it's gonna be when cable companies do movies on demand for:
$20 a month watch all you want or $1 a day watch all you want, or 25 cents watch that movie all day. Something along those lines would get you a lot of customers.
I personally liked Ephpod better. I just needed a simple interface, and I wasn't going to be buying any music from the Itunes store. For those of you who don't know, Ephpod is a free software package that is used to upload/organize/configure music on your ipod. Give it a shot, I really liked it.
I liked working as a field tech. Got to drive around, working on different people's problems. I loved helping people and getting to feel like a hero. I did not like the pay, or the, "Stay on site until it's done, but be here at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow" attitude. I quit after 1 year.
I liked working as a hosting admin. I dug servers, and working with the OS to do the developers bidding. I did NOT like getting paged constantly with servers issues that were beyond my control due to the crappy product. I quit after 2 years.
Now I am a programmer, and I currently like where I am. The whole time I have had a family to support, but I know if I am not happy at work, nobody is going to be happy at home. I bet the guy shoveling shit at the horsetrack doesn't like his job either, he should quit too. That's the great thing about America, you can just go get a new job. Sure you may have to give things up, but a job is all about choice.
You have to decide what is important to you. You will never be rich as a teacher, but be a teacher if it's what you love. You will never (I guess from this article) be rich as a game programmer, or have a life outside of work, but you get to do what you love. I play a lot of poker, and toyed with the idea of going pro, but after a very short try (kept my job, just played at the pro level for a few weeks), I really did not want to play poker.. at all! It became a job.. a job I wanted to quit.
So, pick a job you like. Some people LIKE having a job that is their life, some people like having a hobby that turns into a job. The whole of the job is equal to the sum of all it's parts.
..there are 2 kinds of people that can be professional poker players. People with a freakish talent for poker (very very rare) and people that could make more money doing something else but choose not too. It takes a lot of skill to play poker, and playing for 4 months.. you don't have a clue. It's like when you first learn to code, your the man when you learn about a subroutine!
If you don't know who David Sklansky is, you don't make money playing poker. I have been playing poker for years, and most of the players I know say the make money, or 'break even'. Yah? Do they keep records? If the answer is no, then you do not make money.
About 10% of poker players are profitable. This does not mean, you won big one night, and forgot to write down those couple of loses. It means, play 40 hours a week for a year, and see where you are. Play 50,000 hands and see where you are. If you have 10 people playing.. the best player will eventually get all the money, it's just a matter of time. It may take years, but it will happen.
I don't mean to troll at all with this. It's just when I keep reading, "I am an above average poker player and have been playing for 4 months and here is what I have to say..." it makes me think how every thinks they are "above average drivers."
So am I an above average player with all my obnoxious 'insight'? Well, I am paying taxes from poker this year, so yeah.
Correct. It is very similar to an online newsclipping service like CustomScoop. However with a paid service that that you can get all kinds of automated emails, and very specialized keyword searches. Kinda neat stuff.
There are even companies that still have people that read newspapers by hand, and clip articles for their customers, amazing.
Would they really allow full free access, or would they want to limit it to just port 80? I would think having full open access would just allow script kiddies to go nuts. Would there be any real harm if just port 80 were allowed? Would it be possible to use comprimised machines in Philly to DDOS if that was the only port allowed? Ok, enough questions, back to work.
Know what always pissed me off? I would be rolling d6 and thinking.. damn.. I can never hit for more than 3 with this cruddy club. Then to realize, somebody actually bought a d6... that had two 1s two 2s and two 3s. ack!!!
I love www.allofmp3.com. I think it's a great service. Instead of using I-Tunes to load my I-Pod I have been using ephpod and have been very happy with it. Plus, it's free, I always love that!
I found the I-tunes a little annoying, since I wasn't planning on using their store, I just wanted to load up my music library. So far allofmp3.com has been great. And ephpod works just like you expect it to, smooth.
Along those lines, I had a similar issue. My school had a concentration in CS, that you could only receive if you were getting your BA in math. I was already working on my math degree, and figured since I was into computers, I would try to get the CS concentration too.
I ended up taking only 1 CS course and it was very bad, and not useful. This was mostly due to a really bad prof that ended up losing his job.
So, I am currently the Lead Developer for a small software company and have only taken 1 computer course. And I know of at least 1 time where I got hired over another person because I had a Math degree as opposed to his CS degree. Their reasoning was interesting..
The hiring people had done a lot of CS and to them.. it was easy. But they had also taken a few high level math coures found them hard (well.. duh). When they found out I had taken many difficult higher level math courses, they just assumed that the CS stuff would come real easy to me.
College is a lot more then just learning a trade. This seems more along the lines of a very expensive trade school. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that, but this seems much different than a more traditional 4 year school and should be treated as such.
I think going for a 2 year tech degree is a great move for lots of people.
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We are using an idea like this at my shop. We are about 10 people and I run the tech, if we were bigger it probably would not work. I don't lock boxes down. We let people who want to pick out what they work with, you want a desktop with 3 monitors? Sure. A 17" laptop? Sure. A great travel 15" laptop, fine. Mac Pro? No problem. And when asked, "Can I install X, Y, Z on it?" Sure, it's yours basically, do whatever you'd like with it. And when you have problems we'll try and help you fix YOUR machine, while we are blowing it away and resetting it up YOU can use this old machine for 2 days. It's a tool to do your job, do what you want with it.
Basically I've found that if you have them think of that machine as theirs, they treat it better. So instead of their mindset being, "Well, I'll just download this, my antivirus will stop me if it's bad and IT can deal with it" They have been thinking, "It's probably not worth messing with, I don't want to screw up MY computer."
Like I said, we are willing to help them, but I tell them straight up that it is their laptop/desktop to use. When some people leave we've just let them take their old laptop with them. I mean, they picked it out, it's got the stuff they want on it, and it's 2 years old, take it. The new guy will want to pick his own stuff out.
If we grew much bigger though we'd need more in the line of policy.
I've looked around, I haven't seen any information about a new AirRave this year. Do you have more information on it? Or could you point me in that direction good sir? What I really want is to just be able to buy a box, plug it in, and boom, instant bars. The Network Extender I have for my Verizon phone is like that, it's wonderful!
I've gotta give the nod to Picasa. Free and easy to use. The ONLY drawback I've had with it is reading mp4 video files (which my Sony camera takes). I had to install a codec pack to force windows to make thumbnails and then Picasa would recognize them. Aside from that it has all the fun home features you need, auto face recognition and nice easy ways to do things in bulk.
I use dropbox for sort of the same reason. I've also found that it's replaced my thumb drive and ftp server to some degree. If I have mp3s at home and I want to bring them to work, or vice versa, I just drop box 'em. It really is a lot easier then actually having to manage your data. It's also been handy if I have a friend I want to share a doc with that I update a lot, ala RockBand "These are the songs I have".xls Being that drop box allows you to give an http readonly link to your file on the cloud. And up to 2 gigs free! It's sweet.
Glad you liked it! The ticket system has been a HUGE help for us. I'll go to a meeting and be asked, "Did you guys fix that spreadsheet bug we talked about last week?" "Oh, man, I'm sorry I forgot. Can you put that in as a ticket for us?" It's not that I want to be a dick about stuff but we really depend on stuff getting into the ticket system for tracking. If they can't put the effort in to make a ticket I certainly can't be bothered to work on it. That way they also know when we've done the request. I also write a weekly report for my boss with a quick 1 liner for each open ticket in the system/any ticket that has been closed in the last week. It's become so that anybody working here knows if they have something they really want to get attention, make it a ticket. It will be reviewed for certain. Sure, you can send us a mail and we might do it but hey, we have a ticket system so if you feel strongly about getting something worked on put it in there.
Internally for our group we only make tickets for each other if it's something we want to document. "Andy, please fix the blown up script on server 5 again" That way when he does and closes the ticket he'll tie it to source control and write what he did to fix it, that way anybody here can fix server 5 when perl blows up on it if he's on vacation. Having good docs like that only save us time down the road. No more, "Remember when we had this problem last year? uh.. remember how that took 2 days to figure out.. what did we do again? Did Bill fix it?" Just do a quick search through the tickets and boom. It's like you get self building docs.
I run a small dev team for a company of 12 people. 2 of us are 'senior' dev guys, 1 is a graphics guy in marketing, and the 4th is a guy still in school. The rest are professional services or customer reps. My company does web crawling (lots of SQL, perl, automation) and then some web stuff to display the results and various reports. Pretty much I meet with the owner once a week and we make sure we are on the same page as to what the big projects we are working on (more news coverage, some cool new chart system, etc.) then we have a really quick tech huddle every morning at 9:00. Pretty much roll your chair over and we all look at the whiteboard, what did you do yesterday, what are we working on today. Are we on track to get X done for Monday? And y done for next Monday? Every piece of every project is on the board assigned to somebody. We use source control and have a ticket system, here's a good example of how we worked on a recent project together.
We needed to write a new mail system. We mail out a few thousand reports a day to clients but our old one was prone to errors and failures. I work mostly with SQL, perl, and architecture, I suck at web/interface stuff. I know enough about it to throw a table up but it is ugly. The other senior guy is great at interface stuff, slick javascripty boxes and he's OK with backend stuff but it's never optimized and will bog down. We know what each other is good at and we like it that way! So I sat down in a conference room with my senior guy and we mapped out how to do this. A queue system, this talks to this, we need a template here, this should be stored in a db, this should be in the code, etc. Broke it all down into pieces. I took on the details loading up of the queue system, the other guy took on the reading out of the queue to send the mails. With that he gave the graphics guy the task of "Write up all the CSS to make 4 templates of daily reports, make them look cool". He would then take that CSS and dump it into the mailing code he had written. I had our Jr. guy write internal reporting of the queuing system to track when mails go out and an internal dashboard of it.
Once it was decided what we were doing nobody had to waste time in meetings or anything, just needed to talk once in a while, "Hey, I'm going to put this flag in the queue tell you which template to use, how do you want to receive it on your end?" Each piece of the project is compartmentalized, I don't even need to think, "gee, I hope the graphics line up" or "Oh man, I'll need to write an internal report for this", it's all been delegated. I just do my part, everybody does there's and when it's all done we test and I just make sure the end product is solid. "Ok, reports going out now? I'll reboot the mail server, let's see if we lose any repots, the queue handles that right?" Not having to worry about all the details makes doing my part much easier. I worried about the details when we designed it, so now it's just getting it done. In the end I'm the director and it's up to me to make sure it's done but I act a lot more like a peer as I do as much work as the other guys, but I also handle all the meetings with the other groups. My team can focus on code and banging that project out while I deal with any BS that would just slow the team down. I've found this is a huge help on moral, how bad is it when the marketing guy wants his cake and eat it too and then the whole dev team just goes back to there desk and bitches about it. Instead I just go to the meeting 1 on 1 and will say, "I think you just wanted to cake here, no eating." That way he doesn't look silly and I can go back to my team and say, "Ok, we are baking a cake." and there is no confusion. I'd say half of being a good dev leader is understand wtf the people really want (not what they ask for) and then translating that to the rest of the dev guys, "Hey, let's be solution providers, not coders."
I've found using a ticket system is helpful for people outside my department for putting requests in, for
I've been playing poker as a hobby for several years and recently at work I had a time when I was pretty unhappy. I started as a PC desk jockey->server guy->scripter->application guy->dba->manager->? over 10 years. So I too felt that I had sort of done it all and was thinking of going pro poker. I had a long talk with my wife (and we have a daughter) and a full time poker pro I'm friends with and it made me realize that it is also another job with all it's ++ and --. But I wanted to put some real effort into this and started playing every weekend (basically part time job) and all of a sudden it was a job and I while I would be playing poker I actually started to think, "I wish I was back at work." We then had some personal changes at work and all of a sudden, work was great!
It turned out that my current work environment had changed and that's what was dragging me down. With the new personal and actually getting to play with the 'greener grass' at the poker table I was reinvigorated and excited about computers once again. Just like everybody else here is saying, you need some kind of break and not just a 1 week vacation. Get really serious about another hobby, and either: end up making that your job, or come around and get back to your old job.
Believe me, having a family makes it tough. But you've gotta try some things so you'll be happy (and in turn the family is happy) with minimal risk to them. Everyone gets tired of being on the same scene after a while. Heck, I'm sure porn stars hate going to work after a while.
I've used this service to grab a album for $9. Seemed perfectly fair to me. When I buy albums now I get the disc, rip it, put a copy on my laptop, one on my desktop, and one on my ipod and basically just toss the CD into a pile. This is much more convenient and seems reasonably priced compared to the $14 I would expect at Best Buy. High quality, 'cheap', and a fast download, that's what I want.
It's the same reason I used to use allofmp3. I would actually be at work thinking of an album I had at home and would just go spend the $2 to download it instead of waiting to go home and rip it. To further express how lazy I have been, I've actually been at my desk at home, knew I had an album in my pile of disks that I wanted to rip but just went to allofmp3 and downloaded it for $1.50 instead. I mean, come on, that's pretty lazy. My thought process was along the lines of, "Well, by the time I find it, rip and, tag it, and get it loaded I could be listening to it AND I don't even have to get up... yah.. here is my $1.50!"
You mean made!! I'm rich, woo hoo!
And this is what we do every winter, pay a plumber (about $75) to drain your pipes. He'll put anti freeze in the places he can't drain (say the toilets). You could drain the house on your own but you want to pay somebody else that has the insurance to cover in case there is a problem. Another thing we do is call a neighbor that is up there 1 time during the winter and ask them to walk around outside after a storm. If you are in an area that could be damaged by wind (say ocean front, or heavey woods) you may want to put up some plywood over any expensive windows, but as long as the water is off you'll be ok even if a window does get broken. My only other small tip is if you have wooden window sills (on the inside) is to cover them with some newpaper. I know it sounds silly but direct sun on those will cause them to fade over the years, and you can save them a bit with some protection while your away for a long stretch. If you do that and come back in 5 months, the paper will be all yellow and beat, just think what damage it slowly does to your sills! The last thing to do when you leave is shut off your house breaker and any heat (like a furnace). No electricity = no weird electric short causing a fire. Or if there were something crazy happen that damaged your house at least there won't be electrcity going to start a fire. Over all, call a local plumber and he should tell you all the above stuff. It's really pretty simple.
/. but most New England summer rental property has this issue, and they don't put up a web cam with apache to solve it. Sometimes the best solution is the easy one. Anyways, good luck!
I've read a bunch of these tech responses and come on people.. these are solutions far more complicated then needs be. I know this is a question being posted on
We started using a Mirra box a year or so ago at work. It's a really really easy box to setup: plug in power, plug in network cable, turn on, put CD into the machine you want backed up, click next a bunch, magic. It's pretty cheap ($300?), has 150gb of space, automated, has version control, and you can access your backups from anywhere. It really is as easy as they say. We've been using with about 10 people in the office with no problems, http://www.mirra.com/. I think it also runs some form of Linux if you wanted to hook a keyboard up to it and see what's going on.
/d to this other drive. Works great for me!
However I don't want to chuck $300 for a home backup box, so what I do with my 30gig 'collection' of junk is run a script to another drive. I just have a big 'ole 120gig drive and everyday a batch file kicks off, xcopy
I'd have to agree. I look at it like buying music CDs. I used to buy a CD for $15, but then I found Napster, and then peer to peer, but it became a hassle and I didn't want to put the time in. Then there was Itunes, but the price was about the same as just buying the CD. Then I found (on Slashdot) http://www.allofmp3.com./ I don't mind paying for the stuff, I just don't want to spend a lot, or have it be a hassle, there has to be a happy medium for movies. I think it's gonna be when cable companies do movies on demand for:
$20 a month watch all you want or $1 a day watch all you want, or 25 cents watch that movie all day. Something along those lines would get you a lot of customers.
I personally liked Ephpod better. I just needed a simple interface, and I wasn't going to be buying any music from the Itunes store. For those of you who don't know, Ephpod is a free software package that is used to upload/organize/configure music on your ipod. Give it a shot, I really liked it.
Oh no, do come play with djhertz! It's all for fun. I just happen to think that winning a lot of money is fun..
Fuck That Place.
Seriously, it's a carrer choice.
I liked working as a field tech. Got to drive around, working on different people's problems. I loved helping people and getting to feel like a hero. I did not like the pay, or the, "Stay on site until it's done, but be here at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow" attitude. I quit after 1 year.
I liked working as a hosting admin. I dug servers, and working with the OS to do the developers bidding. I did NOT like getting paged constantly with servers issues that were beyond my control due to the crappy product. I quit after 2 years.
Now I am a programmer, and I currently like where I am. The whole time I have had a family to support, but I know if I am not happy at work, nobody is going to be happy at home. I bet the guy shoveling shit at the horsetrack doesn't like his job either, he should quit too. That's the great thing about America, you can just go get a new job. Sure you may have to give things up, but a job is all about choice.
You have to decide what is important to you. You will never be rich as a teacher, but be a teacher if it's what you love. You will never (I guess from this article) be rich as a game programmer, or have a life outside of work, but you get to do what you love. I play a lot of poker, and toyed with the idea of going pro, but after a very short try (kept my job, just played at the pro level for a few weeks), I really did not want to play poker.. at all! It became a job.. a job I wanted to quit.
So, pick a job you like. Some people LIKE having a job that is their life, some people like having a hobby that turns into a job. The whole of the job is equal to the sum of all it's parts.
Well, half of the people that voted. So closer to a quarter of the population I would guess.
..there are 2 kinds of people that can be professional poker players. People with a freakish talent for poker (very very rare) and people that could make more money doing something else but choose not too. It takes a lot of skill to play poker, and playing for 4 months.. you don't have a clue. It's like when you first learn to code, your the man when you learn about a subroutine!
If you don't know who David Sklansky is, you don't make money playing poker. I have been playing poker for years, and most of the players I know say the make money, or 'break even'. Yah? Do they keep records? If the answer is no, then you do not make money.
About 10% of poker players are profitable. This does not mean, you won big one night, and forgot to write down those couple of loses. It means, play 40 hours a week for a year, and see where you are. Play 50,000 hands and see where you are. If you have 10 people playing.. the best player will eventually get all the money, it's just a matter of time. It may take years, but it will happen.
I don't mean to troll at all with this. It's just when I keep reading, "I am an above average poker player and have been playing for 4 months and here is what I have to say..." it makes me think how every thinks they are "above average drivers."
So am I an above average player with all my obnoxious 'insight'? Well, I am paying taxes from poker this year, so yeah.
Now, let's shuffle up and deal!
There are even companies that still have people that read newspapers by hand, and clip articles for their customers, amazing.
Would they really allow full free access, or would they want to limit it to just port 80? I would think having full open access would just allow script kiddies to go nuts. Would there be any real harm if just port 80 were allowed? Would it be possible to use comprimised machines in Philly to DDOS if that was the only port allowed? Ok, enough questions, back to work.
Yes
I.. uh.. yah... hate that stuff. I would never got looking for that stuff.... yah.
Know what always pissed me off? I would be rolling d6 and thinking.. damn.. I can never hit for more than 3 with this cruddy club. Then to realize, somebody actually bought a d6... that had two 1s two 2s and two 3s. ack!!!
I found the I-tunes a little annoying, since I wasn't planning on using their store, I just wanted to load up my music library. So far allofmp3.com has been great. And ephpod works just like you expect it to, smooth.
I ended up taking only 1 CS course and it was very bad, and not useful. This was mostly due to a really bad prof that ended up losing his job.
So, I am currently the Lead Developer for a small software company and have only taken 1 computer course. And I know of at least 1 time where I got hired over another person because I had a Math degree as opposed to his CS degree. Their reasoning was interesting..
The hiring people had done a lot of CS and to them.. it was easy. But they had also taken a few high level math coures found them hard (well.. duh). When they found out I had taken many difficult higher level math courses, they just assumed that the CS stuff would come real easy to me.
Kind of neat story I think, just my 2 cents.
College is a lot more then just learning a trade. This seems more along the lines of a very expensive trade school. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with that, but this seems much different than a more traditional 4 year school and should be treated as such.
I think going for a 2 year tech degree is a great move for lots of people.