As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the parent
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm a woman who's been in computing since the early 1980's. I (reluctantly) agree with the parent for the most part. Quick description of me: people I've worked with at a large software tool vendor have termed me "the geekiest womam I know" and admins and students considered me the school's "lead hacker" in college.
I'm not sure that I'd say women are "better in less geeky programming, where it is more business oriented," but I would say that (in general) women I've known tend to prefer that end of the field. Maybe it's a desire to not have to spend their evenings learning new languages and technologies; maybe it's just less of an interest in pure technology and a predisposition toward seeing tech as just a tool for getting other things done; maybe it's something else entirely. But in my experience, the pattern does seem to exist. That generalization doesn't apply to me. I strongly prefer the "more geeky" hackerish stuff that requires keeping up with tech; it appeals to my curiosity about how things work. Nevertheless, the generalization has affected my career, because it's a perception many of my managers have had over the years. To be fair, my career does span two decades, and I started out in the southeast US, an area not well-known for progressive attitudes towards women in the work force. Lately, I've seen MUCH less of this, though perhaps it's because I'm now on the West Coast.
The experience I gained for myself in school included UNIX file systems kernel work, IBM mainframe data communications and systems-programming-level assembler, writing an ancient commercial computer game, etc. I spent my vacations paying my own way to Usenix UNIX research conferences and my spare student cash on a Compuserve connection and the PC Pursuit service (cheap long distance for calling BBSes) in the pre-Internet days. When I got out into the real world: "no, we don't think you're right for this systems position, how about this COBOL application development group?", (I was far better, and more experienced, at OS internals in C or assembly than I was at COBOL) "we need someone with your expertise in user interface design," (huh? I had none), etc. An astonishing percentage of the time, companies have steered me toward work in business applications even when I demonstrated more aptitutde and interest in other areas of computing. One choice quote: "Oh, honey, you don't want to spend your days lugging 50 pound servers around." Reality: I have found it frustrating to work in the same business apps development environment for very long. After a very short period of "learning the environment", my work consisted largely of tediously lining fields up on grids and populating database schema, NOT learning about technology or improving/challenging my dev skills (companies specifically didn't want new technologies used in their apps because then, horrors, my coworkers would have to LEARN them!). At one place of employment, a small VAR, I referred a (less technical) male friend to my employer. Before I knew it, he was the organization's official customer engineer (a job function that previously occupied half my day), getting to do customer system configurations, on-site support, etc. I was only trotted out as a problem solver when customers had trouble with their installations, complained and specifically requested my presence, having heard through the grapevine that there was a girl at the company who really knew her stuff even though the company insisted my friend was their best techie. Other women I know have had similar experiences.
It wasn't until I hung out my own shingle and had right of refusal over EVERY project, that I was able to lead my career away from that.
This is applicable to the slashdot crowd because I'd like to encourage folks to take an open mind toward the women you encounter in tech. Some of us have wired our homes with X-10 gear, read OS source code with breakfast and yes, even have a history of butting heads with school admins over learning activities they insisted
OH? What part of Microsoft are YOU in that's not exciting? I work on the main campus and it's much, much more exciting than I ever expected it could be (and definitely more exciting than any place I've worked in years).
For example, within 6 months of employment, my released project was a subject of discussion on Slashdot. (Really, it's 2005, and Microsoft technology is not all about NEAR and FAR pointers, MFC and "NIH" attitude any more.)
The IT folks have all sorts of state of the art hardware to play with, and the stakes of "getting it right" are very high, because if Microsoft doesn't, people aren't inclined to give the company much of a break.
A friend of mine was marvelling how Bank of America, which is normally very fast to process debits and checks written against a balance, seemed to lag a bit between late the week before last and mid this week. As in, none of his transactions against his balance posted for nearly a week, then in the middle of this week, they all posted at once. He speculated that they must have had computer problems for a few days.
I wonder if the behavior he was telling me about was a result of everything stopping while the bank investigated this records situation. I don't have B of A, so I can't tell if it was just something unique to his account, or if it affected all customers.
I even find every operating system I could possibly buy-- from Apple, from Sun, from Redhat-- natively runs the same (POSIX) programs... except the ones Microsoft makes.
Trager stuff rocks. Mine doesn't look too much like a laptop backpack, has padding in the back and a separate padded laptop sleeve, room for lots of papers/books, separate pockets for adapter, cards, cords. It also has a lifetime guarantee. The foam came off from around the handle at the top of the bag (because I carry it that way a lot in addition to riding my bike with it as a backpack) a year or so ago, and I called them and they said I could send it to them and they'd send a replacement. When they found out I'm in Seattle (they are also), they said "or you could just top by if you don't want to be without it for a while." I went by, and did the swap. It appears that as long as I like the style, I have a self-renewing laptop backpack. It was pricey at around $150, but has so far lasted me about 5 years, including travel, biking to work, etc.
Original post said: "or install a tracking device on your bike"... ?
OK, I've wanted something like this for a while. (It has to do with a double-locked bike stolen from a library bike rack two blocks from the police station... yeah, it was an irreplaceable bike from when I was sponsored, and yeah, I was naive, and yeah I thought multiple locks and proximity to the police made that location safe enough...)
Is there one that works that doesn't cost $1000? The only way I can guess to make one is to transmit coordinates obtained from a GPS, and since the GPS has to have line-of-site to satellites, it's usefulness when hidden enough not to be noticeable to a thief is questionable.
Earthlink already blocks dialup access to port 25's other than their own SMTP servers. They started sometime in the early 2000's. How do I know this? It's a sad, sad story.
I was a consultant who telecommuted to work, from the other corner of the country. I used Earthlink dialup to get to the Net. Among other things, I had my outgoing mail server set to the company's mail server, so that my headers would appear identical to those of any other person in the company.
One weekend, our corporate admin updated the email server software on our servers. Now, be aware that the server apparently had some issues (wouldn't accept fragmented packets as a security workaround to a packet filter that didn't properly analyze them, for example) that resulted in my connectivity to it (from the other corner of the counry) not always being flawless.
I soon realized that that morning, after this server update, I could no longer send email to customers through the company's server. Note that the only change to the infrastructure I used to send mail, that I was aware of at the time, was the corporate server update. It seemed logical to me, knowing what types of tradeoffs were considered acceptable by that admin, that the network had been further broken in some way as a security measure. So, I called the guy and said, "Hey, I can't send mail through the company's server any more. What's the deal with that new software?". He said he didn't know and would look into it.
Hours of puzzling later, he got around to monitoring the network to see if the packets I said I was sending were getting to the server in the first place. Answer: no.
The Earthlink fsckers had picked the same weekend to enable port 25 blocking.
Yeah, the admin loved me from that point on. Not.
The workaround, since it was not acceptable to have my email going out with Earthlink headers and too many personal cohorts knew my Earthlink address for me to want to change providers: Admin set up a second mail server listening on a random port number, and told me the port number.
Actually, the relational model was another 1960s revolution, introduced by EF Codd starting in 1969, and through the 1970s
Sure, but it wasn't a "magic pill" until the late 80's, early 90's. In the 1970's and 1980's, I worked with more non-relational databases than relational. Industry seemed to be of the opinion that different DB technologies were useful in different scenarios (a view I still hold today). It was only in the 1990's that everything else seemed to get really pushed to the side, as relational became the DBMS buzzword du jour (even for those who knew almost nothing about databases) and a magic panacea for many organizations' data ills.
As someone who was in the trenches at the time and had to deal with multiple sets of customers complaining about response time when boring ISAM-based database back-ends that worked just fine were ripped out and replaced by RDBMS's because the CEO's golf buddy said "you have to go relational, it's the cool thing now," I got to see firsthand that relational is not always the best solution.
Sure, some automated assistance regarding organizing my data would be welcome. And sure, some types of data lend themselves well to the relational model (MP3 collections, anyone?).
I'm just uncomfortable with the overhead of the relational model for doing so in all cases.
I wasn't suggesting XML as a data format for a file system (yikes!).... just illustrating that the relational model isn't necessarily a one-size-fits-best solution for all data organization needs.
I don't know about the "last" word in file systems, but they won't be anything but klugey simulations of antiquated paper cabinets until their first word is "SELECT". Will someone finally replace the hierarchical inode database with relational tables, and a SQL API? Throw in a traditional file/directory API mapped to SQL statements, and the world will beat a path/filespec to your door
Just as relational databases are good for organizing some types of data, hierarchical approaches are more functional for OTHER sorts of data. After years of everyone saying that the relational model was the answer to all data organziation needs... the hierarchical model reappeared in the form of XML, and people realized that it is convenient to organize some types of data hierarchically. For example, I WANT a snapshot of all of my source code for version 2.3 of a software product in one directory, and I don't want it intermixing at all with the code for version 3.1. A customer's order history (one customer, many orders) is also hierarchical although it's easy enough to implement a relational version of it. Etc.
The relational model as the answer to every data organization problem? The 90's called. They want their revolutionary idea back.;-)
Much was made in days of yore (NT 3.x) of "the Cairo timeframe".... Cairo being some as-yet-unnamed future version of NT containing a certain feature set. I don't recall NT 4 ever being referred to as Cairo, though they were certainly talking about Cairo before NT 4 was released.
there has always been dynamic people, who truly has interests in their field. There must be some of 'em in late 30s, early 40s. I wish I could meet one of them, I could finally change my opinion.
Here's another! Self-motivated, technical, former lead-student-hacker at my large state school. Currently, I do protocol analysis, research and tool-writing. Maybe the important data point here is that I didn't do my thesis and thus didn't actually get the MsC?;-) I personally know more folks of the type you cite below who got their masters in BUSINESS computing rather than CS... but I'm sure some of the latter do exist.
I'm beginning to think that most of the masters in CS in the late 30s, early 40s are super-incompetents.... they still are strucked with their Clipper way of thoughts.
Be careful about equating knowledge/skill in your favorite technology du jour with competence, friend. Trade schools teach the technology du jour. Universities teach ways of thought which can be used to quickly pick up new technologies WHEN NEEDED. This means, if I haven't needed it, and don't find it particularly interesting (designing dialog boxes for KDE == not interesting to me, so I don't yet know how to do it, for example), I likely don't know it, because I know other ways to get similar things done.
And also, what's this mention of Clipper? (BTW, there are two Clippers. One's a chip and the other is a lame dbase2 language clone compiler that the less clued got excited about 16 years ago. "dBase" is a better analogy that will convey what you want.;-) Back in the day I refused to work on that sort of junk, and got away with it easily because I had skills in so many different areas. Did lots of people with less in the clue department than "real" comp sci types work in it? Sure, and their equivalents are doing the same sort of business programming in VB today. Be very glad they're excited about what they're doing, as there's a lot of that sort of work to do, and if they're doing it, you don't have to.:-)
And regarding your attitude towards those who are not object-oriented programmers? You might as well bash C for being non-OO (and by implication the skill of those who use it to develop "stupid" things like OS kernels). Using the right tool for the right job is important, and it's not always OO. Religiousity as a developer tends to be limiting.
The MHT format is specified in RFC 2557, an open standard.... so you can implement your own MHT writer or reader if you like.
The trick with saving a page as an MHT in IE is that if the page includes any frames that are not visible (which are made visible by script that runs when the user clicks on buttons for example), IE appears to not automatically load that content, so the saved page doesn't include it. If you have a complex page, you might need to write code (or use chili kat if it's in your budget) to get an MHT created in the manner you would like.
The parent asks, "where are the points of failure that can't be figured out with any other method besides packet sniffing?"
I do dev and protocol analysis work. Sometimes I've needed to look at packet traces to debug stuff I'm writing; other times I've needed to look at them to identify and document undocumented behaviors of protocols. Switches, routers and the like can do things to packets that client and server writers don't always anticipate. If I'm writing a client, I don't always have access to the server machine (which may belong to a completely different company) to run code under a debugger, add logging info, etc. If the server isn't playing nice, and I've only got access to the network that's running the client, sometimes packet traces are the easiest (or only) way to determine where things are falling apart.
Well, would you expect to be paid more than the next employee, if you worked an average of 10 hours more per week, 400 per year, had 25% more job experience and put in 90% of the overtime hours?....
OK, dude. Don't make blanket generalizations. I have in fact worked at several companies who frequently specifically chose to hire women because they knew they could save 20-30% on salary by hiring a single or a family's second earner. (One mistake that does seem to be fairly common on the part of women professionally is a willingness to accept far less salary than comparable men, possibly because fewer are in the "sole family breadwinner" position that many men are, or possibly due to less confidence about what their skills are worth.) These women were putting in, in most cases, as many OR MORE hours than the men in similar positions in the company -- typical was around 55 hours a week. In general, I would say they were several years more experienced and more skilled than the guys in the company who were in comparable positions. I saw this phenomenon mostly in the southeast US; out here on the West Coast, it seems much less prevalent. So don't excuse ALL of the lower pay by saying "ya get paid what you're worth, if you're not worth as much as men, quitcherbitchin and change it if you really do care"... because things are just not that simple in the real world.
And to blockquote again:
If women were really paid that much less for the same work, why don't companies fire all their male employees, replace them with women and drive their compeditors out of business?
Because most don't dare to be that blatant due to discrimination on basis of gender being illegal. Note again, however, that I have worked in places for which there were 5 or 6 female programmers for every 1 male programmer (and hint: it wasn't because the women were any more qualified than the male applicants) for exactly that reason. So it does definitely happen.
You don't get slashdotted just because you're in somebody's comment, even a well-moderated one.
9:35pm PST:
The spamoo link in the grandparent comment works. However, when I tried to learn "About Spamoo" on the General Menu in the page, it only produced the required page SOME of the time for me. I had to try several times before it brought up the requested page.
So, it may be that a link in a comment, in and of itself, won't get one/.'d, but apparently a link in a comment.... to a site whose functionality is partially implemented as aspx's;-), is sufficient to earn one partial/.'ing. I wonder what their server's horsepower is, and if it's doing anything else this evening.....
Actually, it's NOT minimum wage. In the Seattle area, it pays better than most retail work. (Out of work techies take note: I know more than one of our kind doing this particular job while they wait for a tech opportunity.)
Or at least it does if you said that in zork. That word (plugh) (and xyzzy, and plover, etc.) is from original Adventure (a version of which was produced by Microsoft in 1982/1983 for the original IBM PC.... I still have the disk somewhere....).
You are greeted with the above comment ("A hollow voice...") if you try the Advent words in zork.;-)
{ The poster is looking for alternatives to tar, because he has concerns about tarball content recovery. }
It's been possible to do that for well over a decade, using various utilities such as tarx. I've successfully recovered files after a damaged point in a tarball many times. (Sigh, I used to use an old AT&T UNIX with a #$*@# broken tar, which occasionally created corrupt tarballs).
See
this post on the Sun Managers list circa 1993, and the venerable comp.sources.unix collection, volume 24, for the sources.
Quick hint: For more info on the situation at Disney from two former longtime board members, see http://www.savedisney.com
I've been a shareholder in DIS since the 1970's and have weathered other potential takeover storms.
The reason this one is different from the one 20 years ago is that I think the potential buyer has in mind the protection of the longterm value of the Disney brand and its associated assets. This brings benefit to shareholders beyond any premium in share price that might be offered. (If you don't know, many shareholders are somewhat concerned that the current Disney management team is focusing more on short-term profits than long-term value... and if you need a lesson as to why that's not the best approach, I'm guessing you're not an ex-dot-com'er.)
In the case of the animation business which has arguably languished lately (closure of animation facility in Florida for example; also a focus on computer rather than hand animation), Comcast seems interested in bringing it to the forefront again. Whether that be through further investment on their part, or selling it off to a creative company like Pixar which could make the most of it, I can only see positive results compared to what's been going on recently here.
In the case of the theme parks, which have experienced reduced maintenance budgets and a serious slowdown in the number of new "big ticket" attractions developed in the past 5 years or so, again I can only see that a change would bring better stewardship of key company assets. Even if it meant selling off or leasing for operation the parks to a company like Six Flags, asking myself if "will the standard for the parks as it currently exists be lowered or raised?", my gut reaction is that it will at worst stay the same.
Anyway, usual caveats here -- not speaking on behalf of ANYONE except myself, and yes, I'm a stockholder in DIS who's in it for the long haul
Surely you're not thinking of the TRS-80 model 100/102?
That would be correct. The poster is not thinking of that. The poster is thinking of something roughly 3" x 7" or so... the size of a large calculator, and about as thick, which allowed programming using BASIC. It really was a POCKET computer not much larger than today's PDA's, though with a single line (IIRC) LCD display. My friend (Betsy, I think) had one.
Sharp made a similar device. I had the Sharp model. It got me through stats. I programmed all the formuli on it -- the prof allowed programmable calculators, not quite aware of HOW programmable, HOW easily, they'd gotten.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that I'd say women are "better in less geeky programming, where it is more business oriented," but I would say that (in general) women I've known tend to prefer that end of the field. Maybe it's a desire to not have to spend their evenings learning new languages and technologies; maybe it's just less of an interest in pure technology and a predisposition toward seeing tech as just a tool for getting other things done; maybe it's something else entirely. But in my experience, the pattern does seem to exist. That generalization doesn't apply to me. I strongly prefer the "more geeky" hackerish stuff that requires keeping up with tech; it appeals to my curiosity about how things work. Nevertheless, the generalization has affected my career, because it's a perception many of my managers have had over the years. To be fair, my career does span two decades, and I started out in the southeast US, an area not well-known for progressive attitudes towards women in the work force. Lately, I've seen MUCH less of this, though perhaps it's because I'm now on the West Coast.
The experience I gained for myself in school included UNIX file systems kernel work, IBM mainframe data communications and systems-programming-level assembler, writing an ancient commercial computer game, etc. I spent my vacations paying my own way to Usenix UNIX research conferences and my spare student cash on a Compuserve connection and the PC Pursuit service (cheap long distance for calling BBSes) in the pre-Internet days. When I got out into the real world: "no, we don't think you're right for this systems position, how about this COBOL application development group?", (I was far better, and more experienced, at OS internals in C or assembly than I was at COBOL) "we need someone with your expertise in user interface design," (huh? I had none), etc. An astonishing percentage of the time, companies have steered me toward work in business applications even when I demonstrated more aptitutde and interest in other areas of computing. One choice quote: "Oh, honey, you don't want to spend your days lugging 50 pound servers around." Reality: I have found it frustrating to work in the same business apps development environment for very long. After a very short period of "learning the environment", my work consisted largely of tediously lining fields up on grids and populating database schema, NOT learning about technology or improving/challenging my dev skills (companies specifically didn't want new technologies used in their apps because then, horrors, my coworkers would have to LEARN them!). At one place of employment, a small VAR, I referred a (less technical) male friend to my employer. Before I knew it, he was the organization's official customer engineer (a job function that previously occupied half my day), getting to do customer system configurations, on-site support, etc. I was only trotted out as a problem solver when customers had trouble with their installations, complained and specifically requested my presence, having heard through the grapevine that there was a girl at the company who really knew her stuff even though the company insisted my friend was their best techie. Other women I know have had similar experiences.
It wasn't until I hung out my own shingle and had right of refusal over EVERY project, that I was able to lead my career away from that.
This is applicable to the slashdot crowd because I'd like to encourage folks to take an open mind toward the women you encounter in tech. Some of us have wired our homes with X-10 gear, read OS source code with breakfast and yes, even have a history of butting heads with school admins over learning activities they insisted
OH? What part of Microsoft are YOU in that's not exciting? I work on the main campus and it's much, much more exciting than I ever expected it could be (and definitely more exciting than any place I've worked in years).
For example, within 6 months of employment, my released project was a subject of discussion on Slashdot. (Really, it's 2005, and Microsoft technology is not all about NEAR and FAR pointers, MFC and "NIH" attitude any more.)
The IT folks have all sorts of state of the art hardware to play with, and the stakes of "getting it right" are very high, because if Microsoft doesn't, people aren't inclined to give the company much of a break.
Interesting in the context of this news story...
A friend of mine was marvelling how Bank of America, which is normally very fast to process debits and checks written against a balance, seemed to lag a bit between late the week before last and mid this week. As in, none of his transactions against his balance posted for nearly a week, then in the middle of this week, they all posted at once. He speculated that they must have had computer problems for a few days.
I wonder if the behavior he was telling me about was a result of everything stopping while the bank investigated this records situation. I don't have B of A, so I can't tell if it was just something unique to his account, or if it affected all customers.
Re: allowing things not available in win32... well, at least a while back, real links worked.
Trager stuff rocks. Mine doesn't look too much like a laptop backpack, has padding in the back and a separate padded laptop sleeve, room for lots of papers/books, separate pockets for adapter, cards, cords. It also has a lifetime guarantee. The foam came off from around the handle at the top of the bag (because I carry it that way a lot in addition to riding my bike with it as a backpack) a year or so ago, and I called them and they said I could send it to them and they'd send a replacement. When they found out I'm in Seattle (they are also), they said "or you could just top by if you don't want to be without it for a while." I went by, and did the swap. It appears that as long as I like the style, I have a self-renewing laptop backpack. It was pricey at around $150, but has so far lasted me about 5 years, including travel, biking to work, etc.
Original post said: "or install a tracking device on your bike" ... ?
OK, I've wanted something like this for a while. (It has to do with a double-locked bike stolen from a library bike rack two blocks from the police station... yeah, it was an irreplaceable bike from when I was sponsored, and yeah, I was naive, and yeah I thought multiple locks and proximity to the police made that location safe enough...)
Is there one that works that doesn't cost $1000? The only way I can guess to make one is to transmit coordinates obtained from a GPS, and since the GPS has to have line-of-site to satellites, it's usefulness when hidden enough not to be noticeable to a thief is questionable.
I was a consultant who telecommuted to work, from the other corner of the country. I used Earthlink dialup to get to the Net. Among other things, I had my outgoing mail server set to the company's mail server, so that my headers would appear identical to those of any other person in the company.
One weekend, our corporate admin updated the email server software on our servers. Now, be aware that the server apparently had some issues (wouldn't accept fragmented packets as a security workaround to a packet filter that didn't properly analyze them, for example) that resulted in my connectivity to it (from the other corner of the counry) not always being flawless.
I soon realized that that morning, after this server update, I could no longer send email to customers through the company's server. Note that the only change to the infrastructure I used to send mail, that I was aware of at the time, was the corporate server update. It seemed logical to me, knowing what types of tradeoffs were considered acceptable by that admin, that the network had been further broken in some way as a security measure. So, I called the guy and said, "Hey, I can't send mail through the company's server any more. What's the deal with that new software?". He said he didn't know and would look into it.
Hours of puzzling later, he got around to monitoring the network to see if the packets I said I was sending were getting to the server in the first place. Answer: no.
The Earthlink fsckers had picked the same weekend to enable port 25 blocking.
Yeah, the admin loved me from that point on. Not.
The workaround, since it was not acceptable to have my email going out with Earthlink headers and too many personal cohorts knew my Earthlink address for me to want to change providers: Admin set up a second mail server listening on a random port number, and told me the port number.
Sure, but it wasn't a "magic pill" until the late 80's, early 90's. In the 1970's and 1980's, I worked with more non-relational databases than relational. Industry seemed to be of the opinion that different DB technologies were useful in different scenarios (a view I still hold today). It was only in the 1990's that everything else seemed to get really pushed to the side, as relational became the DBMS buzzword du jour (even for those who knew almost nothing about databases) and a magic panacea for many organizations' data ills.
As someone who was in the trenches at the time and had to deal with multiple sets of customers complaining about response time when boring ISAM-based database back-ends that worked just fine were ripped out and replaced by RDBMS's because the CEO's golf buddy said "you have to go relational, it's the cool thing now," I got to see firsthand that relational is not always the best solution.
I'm just uncomfortable with the overhead of the relational model for doing so in all cases.
I wasn't suggesting XML as a data format for a file system (yikes!).... just illustrating that the relational model isn't necessarily a one-size-fits-best solution for all data organization needs.
Just as relational databases are good for organizing some types of data, hierarchical approaches are more functional for OTHER sorts of data. After years of everyone saying that the relational model was the answer to all data organziation needs... the hierarchical model reappeared in the form of XML, and people realized that it is convenient to organize some types of data hierarchically. For example, I WANT a snapshot of all of my source code for version 2.3 of a software product in one directory, and I don't want it intermixing at all with the code for version 3.1. A customer's order history (one customer, many orders) is also hierarchical although it's easy enough to implement a relational version of it. Etc.
The relational model as the answer to every data organization problem? The 90's called. They want their revolutionary idea back.
Hmm, got a source on this? Just curious....
Much was made in days of yore (NT 3.x) of "the Cairo timeframe".... Cairo being some as-yet-unnamed future version of NT containing a certain feature set. I don't recall NT 4 ever being referred to as Cairo, though they were certainly talking about Cairo before NT 4 was released.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, but thanks for playing.
"Cairo" = NT 5 = Windows 2000.
Be careful about equating knowledge/skill in your favorite technology du jour with competence, friend. Trade schools teach the technology du jour. Universities teach ways of thought which can be used to quickly pick up new technologies WHEN NEEDED. This means, if I haven't needed it, and don't find it particularly interesting (designing dialog boxes for KDE == not interesting to me, so I don't yet know how to do it, for example), I likely don't know it, because I know other ways to get similar things done.
And also, what's this mention of Clipper? (BTW, there are two Clippers. One's a chip and the other is a lame dbase2 language clone compiler that the less clued got excited about 16 years ago. "dBase" is a better analogy that will convey what you want. ;-) Back in the day I refused to work on that sort of junk, and got away with it easily because I had skills in so many different areas. Did lots of people with less in the clue department than "real" comp sci types work in it? Sure, and their equivalents are doing the same sort of business programming in VB today. Be very glad they're excited about what they're doing, as there's a lot of that sort of work to do, and if they're doing it, you don't have to. :-)
And regarding your attitude towards those who are not object-oriented programmers? You might as well bash C for being non-OO (and by implication the skill of those who use it to develop "stupid" things like OS kernels). Using the right tool for the right job is important, and it's not always OO. Religiousity as a developer tends to be limiting.
The MHT format is specified in RFC 2557, an open standard.... so you can implement your own MHT writer or reader if you like.
The trick with saving a page as an MHT in IE is that if the page includes any frames that are not visible (which are made visible by script that runs when the user clicks on buttons for example), IE appears to not automatically load that content, so the saved page doesn't include it. If you have a complex page, you might need to write code (or use chili kat if it's in your budget) to get an MHT created in the manner you would like.
The parent asks, "where are the points of failure that can't be figured out with any other method besides packet sniffing?"
I do dev and protocol analysis work. Sometimes I've needed to look at packet traces to debug stuff I'm writing; other times I've needed to look at them to identify and document undocumented behaviors of protocols. Switches, routers and the like can do things to packets that client and server writers don't always anticipate. If I'm writing a client, I don't always have access to the server machine (which may belong to a completely different company) to run code under a debugger, add logging info, etc. If the server isn't playing nice, and I've only got access to the network that's running the client, sometimes packet traces are the easiest (or only) way to determine where things are falling apart.
And to blockquote again:
Because most don't dare to be that blatant due to discrimination on basis of gender being illegal. Note again, however, that I have worked in places for which there were 5 or 6 female programmers for every 1 male programmer (and hint: it wasn't because the women were any more qualified than the male applicants) for exactly that reason. So it does definitely happen.The spamoo link in the grandparent comment works. However, when I tried to learn "About Spamoo" on the General Menu in the page, it only produced the required page SOME of the time for me. I had to try several times before it brought up the requested page.
So, it may be that a link in a comment, in and of itself, won't get one /.'d, but apparently a link in a comment.... to a site whose functionality is partially implemented as aspx's ;-), is sufficient to earn one partial /.'ing. I wonder what their server's horsepower is, and if it's doing anything else this evening.....
Actually, it's NOT minimum wage. In the Seattle area, it pays better than most retail work. (Out of work techies take note: I know more than one of our kind doing this particular job while they wait for a tech opportunity.)
A hollow voice says "fool".
Or at least it does if you said that in zork. That word (plugh) (and xyzzy, and plover, etc.) is from original Adventure (a version of which was produced by Microsoft in 1982/1983 for the original IBM PC .... I still have the disk somewhere....).
You are greeted with the above comment ("A hollow voice...") if you try the Advent words in zork. ;-)
It's been possible to do that for well over a decade, using various utilities such as tarx. I've successfully recovered files after a damaged point in a tarball many times. (Sigh, I used to use an old AT&T UNIX with a #$*@# broken tar, which occasionally created corrupt tarballs).
See this post on the Sun Managers list circa 1993, and the venerable comp.sources.unix collection, volume 24, for the sources.
I've been a shareholder in DIS since the 1970's and have weathered other potential takeover storms.
The reason this one is different from the one 20 years ago is that I think the potential buyer has in mind the protection of the longterm value of the Disney brand and its associated assets. This brings benefit to shareholders beyond any premium in share price that might be offered. (If you don't know, many shareholders are somewhat concerned that the current Disney management team is focusing more on short-term profits than long-term value ... and if you need a lesson as to why that's not the best approach, I'm guessing you're not an ex-dot-com'er.)
In the case of the animation business which has arguably languished lately (closure of animation facility in Florida for example; also a focus on computer rather than hand animation), Comcast seems interested in bringing it to the forefront again. Whether that be through further investment on their part, or selling it off to a creative company like Pixar which could make the most of it, I can only see positive results compared to what's been going on recently here.
In the case of the theme parks, which have experienced reduced maintenance budgets and a serious slowdown in the number of new "big ticket" attractions developed in the past 5 years or so, again I can only see that a change would bring better stewardship of key company assets. Even if it meant selling off or leasing for operation the parks to a company like Six Flags, asking myself if "will the standard for the parks as it currently exists be lowered or raised?", my gut reaction is that it will at worst stay the same.
Anyway, usual caveats here -- not speaking on behalf of ANYONE except myself, and yes, I'm a stockholder in DIS who's in it for the long haul
Sharp made a similar device. I had the Sharp model. It got me through stats. I programmed all the formuli on it -- the prof allowed programmable calculators, not quite aware of HOW programmable, HOW easily, they'd gotten. ;-)
Hi, wanna sell the scientific calculator watch to me? Mine gave up the ghost 7-8 years into its life... :-(