I hate to say it, but I agree. As bad as all the trash talking on Comcast is, I've never had a problem. Setup was easy. The 15-20 minute call to swap out my modem for a $15 one I found at a thrift store was straight forward and easy. The only 2 real problems I had was figuring out the modem will only send out DHCP for 1 device (when you put in your firewall/router, you just need to power cycle the modem so it forgets about your PC), and the fact my dam $1,000 Cisco 1760 was the bottleneck in my network connection (replaced with a !#@$* $150 Linksys). And only one of those can remotely be called a Comcast issue.
I've never had a single connection issue in the 4 odd months I've had the service. And now I'm looking forward to messing with IPv6.
It's a standard mini-USB port with a couple extra pins for audio (headphones) and the FM antenna in the headphones. It's actually a VERY nice solution. You get the standard mini-USB connector which works with all standard mini-USB chargers or cables, but if you plug in the special headphone cable, you get audio.
Personally I'd prefer a 3.5mm jack in addition to a mini-USB, but at least they support the mini-usb plug/charging standard very well.
Afghanistan has pretty good cell phone coverage and not horrible long distance rates. And like most of the rest of the world (not U.S.A) any GSM phone that utilizes the right bands (get a quad band world phone) will work there. A SIM card is like $5.00 and you just buy refill cards at whatever denomination you need. No contracts, no BS, just pay as you go.
In Kabul our house had a 512kbs down 128kbs up satellite link that we split between 18 odd people... It only cost $30,000 a year and was about the cheapest satellite connection available. With that little bandwidth and that many people, VoIP worked decently during non-peak use hours, but not so well when everybody was on. Ping times and packet loss really sucked.
About the time I was leaving a group of friends got a wireless connection, 802.11 something or WiMax I think from one of the cell phone companies. It was about as expensive per person & shared bandwidth as our satellite connection. Being terrestrial based rather than satellite, it had much better ping times.
Most of the bigger military bases have some local ISP on the base providing service for reasonable ($10-60 or so a month) rates. Service is usually way over subscribed and supported by cat5 strung over the ground or what not.
The military is pretty good about supporting the troops. If you have a DSN (Defense Switched Network) phone, which is most of the phones the military has over there, you can call a U.S. military base stateside and have them patch you through to a local number near the base, or a 1-800 number for a calling card.
I have a SIPR machine sitting a foot or 2 away from me right now as I type this on a NIPR machine... SIPR is a completely separate network that never touches the Internet. They both are monitored very heavily and if traffic from one showed up on the other, it would get noticed very quickly and fixed. It would be bad and heads would roll, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
The U.S. military world wide has setups not unlike this, it's nothing new in the slightest, along with appropriate systems and procedures to protect them.
I use to work on Kwajalein, and have a friend who was in mission control all day... I can guarantee you they had a lot of VERY expensive camera systems and radar keeping an eye on that launch. I doubt much if any of that data will ever be made public however.
As for the "anomaly" thing, the rocket didn't blow up, they hit the big red panic button to blow it up rather than have one large toxic rocket possibly land on something important (although one of the main reasons the Kwajalein Atoll is used, is because there's not much out there, that and the physics advantages of being near the equator).
I can't help you Canada, but can relay my experiences from Afghanistan.
512 down 128 up dedicated, 1.2 meter dish (I think, could easily be wrong on the dish), ended up running about $30,000 U.S. a year. About 2 people could fired up Vonage VOIP and get a decent connection, any more than than and things went bad. Ping times were 675-800ms when the link wasn't too saturated. We had upwards to 18 different people sharing the link, so it was often saturated, especially in the evenings.
We looked at several different companies, and found some 256 symmetric shared (duno where the sharing took place, ISP or satellite, or what) connections for a little cheaper, but when we tried those out, they were all but unusable.
Getting decent bandwidth and low latency to the ends of the earth isn't cheap, reliable, or effective. It wouldn't surprise me if the middle of nowhere northern Canada had an equally poor satellite footprint to Afghanistan.
I've got a ReadyNAS NV+ (formerly Infrant, now Netgear) and really like it. I'll happily recommend it to anybody. Prices after the Netgear buyout went up a bit, but it's still a decent option if you can afford it.
Their forums have lots of good technical moderators who interact a lot. It runs Linux under the hood, and they will happily tell you how to tweak things that can't really be officially supported. Netgear hasn't seemed to mess up the good support and online community Infrant got started from what I can tell.
I had the power supply die, and they RMA'd it quickly. When I got the replacement back I had some issues with getting it to recognize my old disks (OS version for the new NAS was lower than the one from the old NAS, and you need the disks in the NAS when you upgrade it as things get written to flash and the disks).
It's very quite and doesn't use nearly as much juice as a real PC, and can be officially or unofficial setup to serve HTTP, SSH, pull BitTorrent, serve streaming media & piles of other stuff.
Bullet proof vests are made out of Kevlar and other fabrics and they rate pretty high on the kinetic energy resistance scale. I'd much rather have a Kevlar vest than a steel vest of the same weight for protection not even considering the mobility restrictions on the steel.
A good Kevlar vest will stop most handgun rounds... your average car door won't stop much of any kind of bullet.
Actually VMware is the exact wrong way to go (although it does rock for many purposes). If your looking to put up a server farm for "web 2.0" apps, you want to have each box running as close to 100% efficiency with no extra overhead (VMware). As you scale up in a modular environment you'll gladly trade off the flexibility that VMware gives you for more efficiency. Redundant boxes provides high availability rather than extra software.
Specing hardware for an application farm usually means piles of blades or 1U boxes, depending on the application you probably don't even need redundant hardware, just replace the failed hardware and rebuild from scratch. If your going VMware you'll end up specing bigger mega CPU boxes with massive RAM.
In smaller shops where you require more flexibility to run servers/services that don't require farms VMware gives you a better bang for your buck. Nothing beats VMware for R&D either.
What do you call a doctor that graduated at the bottom of his class at medical school?
Doctor.
The grades you get in the higher education system really don't have much relevance to anything outside of higher education.
Once your out of school and have any experience under your belt, your degree just becomes a check box. You could almost get a bachelors in underwater basket weaving and leverage it as much as a good CS degree. They just check to see that you have the degree, which is an indication of ability to continue learning as much as skill in a given discipline.
All that being said, which one do you think you'll get the most out of. Which will make you a better learner or human being? As a CS student, all the details you learn in college will be mostly obsolete very quickly, but the underlying theories and the ability to keep learning will last a lifetime.
Me, yesterday. It's about $0.70 a gallon and is only 2-4 KD ($7-15) to fill up my car. Of course I'm living in Kuwait at the moment and not back home in the states.
Sadly a case of bottled water (don't drink the tap water here, it's often brownish) is around $6. So the 1-2 gallons of water can cost more than filling up my car on some days.
Top Secret data is in the hands of lots of military contractors. If you handle TS data you have to comply with lots of REALLY overkill security measures. Secret classified data must be kept on SIPR net, which is a huge worldwide network massively encrypted and not connected to the Internet. TS is even more secure.
We actually have a case of thermite grenades sitting in our TCF (where all our communications gear & servers sit). Of course there's also the thousand odd soldiers with M16s around that you have to get through first. Sitting in downtown Kabul Afghanistan and needing all that physical security does make me a bit nervous at times though.
Probably the best present my parents ever got me and my brother was our cat, and later over the years hamsters, gerbils & guinea pigs. However they made an informed decision and planned for all the responsibility that went along with it. Pets help build immune systems in growing kids, don't ask me why, google it, there have been studies. It amazes me how much companionship, stress relief and quality of life improvement pets can bring to a family They also provide a good education on responsibility if the parents properly supervise the kids taking care of the pet.
But remember:
Pets need constant attention. You can get away with leaving a cat home alone for a day, maybe 2, but dogs, especially some breeds need somebody around all the time. I've seen several neighbors leave their dogs alone all day only for them to spend the whole day howling for attention.
Get your pet fixed, or be ready to deal with a lot of puppies/kittens/whatever
Puppies and kittens are cute, dogs and cats aren't. Not only do you have to deal with "the new wearing off" like any other toy, but baby pets are always cuter and more adorable than when they grow up. Don't forget you'll be caring for this animal for upwards to 20 years (possibly longer than you'll be responsible for your kids)
Make sure your pet is properly cared for. Kids can care for them at certain ages, but parents need to make sure everything is done right.
Pets are messy. YOU or possibly your kids will be doing a lot of cleanup after them, especially dogs, and especially when they are young.
Dogs in particular needs lots of training (cats not so much, they usually end up training you). Sit, Stay, No, etc. don't come naturally, it will take a lot of time and effort to get your dog to behave properly. And an untrained dog makes a very poor pet.
Do some research on the breed or species of pet your going to get. Some are MUCH MUCH harder to train than others. Some may look cool, but just don't have good dispositions for being a pet.
If your unsure about your ability to care for a pet properly, don't do it. Start small if you need to, goldfish are about as low maintenance as you can get, if you or your kid can't keep one alive, the ASPCA would be after you if you got something furry and four legged. If you can handle a fish, then think about a hamster, they are cute, reasonably easy to care for, and not as longterm of a commitment as a cat or dog.
My wife and I are in Afghanistan for the year, and leaving our kitty was probably one of the harder things to do. However she is being well cared for by my in-laws who already had a couple cats that our kitty grew up with.
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff. html is a really good read on how the shuttle software is actually made. It's the most reliable software in the world with the most exacting design process.
How many other groups can deliver a half million lines of code with only 1 error (and no, not this issue. And as far as this being an error or bug, it really isn't. It's a know design restriction on a system that just works. Do you really want to go redesign a large chunk and possibly introduce life threatening bugs, or work within the known design window for the system.
I have been living & working overseas for going on 8 years now as a defense contractor. If you have technical skills (more field skills than development), a passport, and a security clearance or the clean record required to get one.
Only American citizens can get a security clearance these days, so the industry is pretty much immune to outsourcing. However working with the government & military means a lot of BS and sometimes not so great living conditions. Depending on where you are looking to go, the pay is good to great, and frequently you don't have to pay taxes or living expenses.
Originally I heard about a job with Raytheon on some tropical island in the Central Pacific, applied, and eventually got hired as an entry level computer technician. Once I got on as a tech working for the contractor that ran the Army base there, they got me my security clearance. Seven years and a big contract change over for the primary contractor running the base I decided to look for greener pastures.
Posting on military related boards along with a good resume and a security clearance ended up yielding quite a few job leads, mostly in the middle east, but some in Germany and other parts of Europe as well.
Right now my wife and I are living on an Army base in Kabul, Afghanistan. each of us is making over double what I'd expect to be making in the states, add to that, no taxes, free room and board, and pretty much minimal if any other expenses and it's quite lucrative. Living conditions aren't that bad, but are much lower than I'd have in the states. We were living in tents for several weeks.
Personally I feel safer here than I would in certain parts of the states. A lot of it depends on where you end up. It's defiantly not for everybody, and you have to be reasonably flexible to deal with all the BS.
I feel quite patriotic for what I do, despite not having lived in the states for almost 8 years. I'm not in the military, but I'm doing my best to give our troops good IT support, which helps our country. Weather we should be over here or not (For the record, I think we should be here in Afghanistan at least), our troops deserve the best support they can get.
A lot of posts have mentioned thing about worries due to sexual harassment problems. The 2 most well adjusted females in our IT department have managed to fit in pretty well pretty quickly. Whether intentionally or more likely just because of their nature they made it very obvious where they stood on sexual harassment issues. Some dirty jokes, lots of hanging out and BSing and it became pretty evident what you could or couldn't do.
Make it obvious, or even flat out state it. I will be annoyed and speak with you first if you do ??? and if you don't stop, I'll bring it up with management. If you do ??? It's going to management right away. Draw your line in the sand on what you will and won't accept. Some people think boundaries were made to be broken, but most of us are pretty content as long as we know where we stand and what we can get away with safely.
On a similar note, never date a co-worker, especially in the same department. I've seen it happen many times, and only once it didn't end very badly for everybody involved. It can hurt your career.
On a more general note, just be yourself. Find out what the cliques are, I'm probably in the gamer, geek, jetskiier & IT guys who have been around a long time cliques (each one has at least 1 female that I'd include as part of the clique). In each of the cliques, I have something in common with the other members, and more often than not we end up talking about stuff relating to the clique.
You may or may not end up having anything in common with the cliques, and it's probably best to not force yourself into them. If people are a gearhead clique, and your not at all into automotive stuff, trying to hang out with them will just end up making you feel like a 3rd wheel to both sides.
Find people who have something in common with you, often just being a fellow IT person can be enough. Be yourself, and let people know who you are and where you stand.
I'm an army contractor in charge of securing non-secret systems.
You need to find the regulations for your orginization (Army Regulation 25-2 for us), and read it. If you don't know that regulation well, and improperly impliment things according to that regulation (which may or may not follow normal security protocols) you can be held crimialy and legally liable.
All that being said, most of that security is all software configuration & auditing, not hardware. Lots of Classified/secret stickers and sometimes removable disks is the only hardware differences.
Slashdot is not the right place to be asking about DoD specific policies. It may be the right forum to ask about generic IT policies, but not the arcane policies of a specific buracuracy.
Army Regulation 25-2, the Army regulation for Information Processing is located at http://www.usapa.army.mil/pdffiles/r25_2.pdf (may only be accessable if your on a.mil address). That may or may not even be the appropiate document, depending on your orginazation.
That's the last time the cat is sleeping on the CPU case...meeeeeeeoooosplsplsplsplsplspl ewwwwwww
That does't stop our cat... at least once a week we hear this Bzzzzzt sound as she stuffs her paw into the power supply fan. Apparently she thinks it's entertaining.
you could use the built-in graphics to run a second monitor, which you'll find very addictive.
Actually the built in graphics card is plugged into the AGP slot (hard wired in, not physicaly in) 99% of the time. You can't have 2 cards in the same slot and there's only 1 AGP slot per motherboard.
You could always use the built in video and a PCI video card... if you can still find one.
I have a 2 year old Sony 18" LCD, probably with a 25ms refresh. It's worked great for everything from Half-Life and Doom 3 to DVD's. Personally I'm never planning on buying another CRT again (monitor, or TV), the new lightweight LCD's and rear projection TV's are the way to go.
On average a battery will last around 2-3 years, tops.
The primary cause to battery failure is sulfitization (sp?) where sulfer crystals form on the battery plates and block the normal battery chemical reactions. This occurs MUCH faster when the battery is not 100% charged. The best thing you can do for any battery is keep it on a trickle charger, which most if not all UPS's do.
If you rarely loose power, normal batteries might be a cheaper choice for similar results. Deep cycle batteries have thicker plates for more durability, and are less likely to have the plates damaged when heavily drained. They sacrafice capacity and avalable amprage for this extra durability. Standard automotive batteries are designed to pretty much never get drawn below 70% capacity.
Unless your into some serious hardware hacking though, I'd stick with something nearly the same as the UPS is speced for.
Aeron's rock, I bought one for use at home and have never regetted it.
They are definatly not the cheapest option out there, but compared to the money most of us toss at computers every year or 2, it's very worth while. It's a very well constructed chair, and I expect mine to last over 10 years (only minor scuffing after 2 so far).
$1,000-2,000 every 1-2 years for a new computer, compared to $600 ever 10 years for a spine saving chair. If you start looking at the numbers it gets a lot easier to push off an upgrade for a little bit to pay for a new chair.
No chair is going to compare with a properly laid out ergonomically correct workstation though. Taking a break to get up, rest your eyes and strech a bit will do more for your body than a $600 chair ever will.
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I hate to say it, but I agree. As bad as all the trash talking on Comcast is, I've never had a problem. Setup was easy. The 15-20 minute call to swap out my modem for a $15 one I found at a thrift store was straight forward and easy. The only 2 real problems I had was figuring out the modem will only send out DHCP for 1 device (when you put in your firewall/router, you just need to power cycle the modem so it forgets about your PC), and the fact my dam $1,000 Cisco 1760 was the bottleneck in my network connection (replaced with a !#@$* $150 Linksys). And only one of those can remotely be called a Comcast issue.
I've never had a single connection issue in the 4 odd months I've had the service. And now I'm looking forward to messing with IPv6.
It's a standard mini-USB port with a couple extra pins for audio (headphones) and the FM antenna in the headphones. It's actually a VERY nice solution. You get the standard mini-USB connector which works with all standard mini-USB chargers or cables, but if you plug in the special headphone cable, you get audio.
Personally I'd prefer a 3.5mm jack in addition to a mini-USB, but at least they support the mini-usb plug/charging standard very well.
Afghanistan has pretty good cell phone coverage and not horrible long distance rates. And like most of the rest of the world (not U.S.A) any GSM phone that utilizes the right bands (get a quad band world phone) will work there. A SIM card is like $5.00 and you just buy refill cards at whatever denomination you need. No contracts, no BS, just pay as you go.
In Kabul our house had a 512kbs down 128kbs up satellite link that we split between 18 odd people... It only cost $30,000 a year and was about the cheapest satellite connection available. With that little bandwidth and that many people, VoIP worked decently during non-peak use hours, but not so well when everybody was on. Ping times and packet loss really sucked.
About the time I was leaving a group of friends got a wireless connection, 802.11 something or WiMax I think from one of the cell phone companies. It was about as expensive per person & shared bandwidth as our satellite connection. Being terrestrial based rather than satellite, it had much better ping times.
Most of the bigger military bases have some local ISP on the base providing service for reasonable ($10-60 or so a month) rates. Service is usually way over subscribed and supported by cat5 strung over the ground or what not.
The military is pretty good about supporting the troops. If you have a DSN (Defense Switched Network) phone, which is most of the phones the military has over there, you can call a U.S. military base stateside and have them patch you through to a local number near the base, or a 1-800 number for a calling card.
if you were to swap them around you'd have the computer connected to the top-secret network on the other side of your desk.
Actually Top Secret is yet another completely different network than SIPR with a heck of a lot more security measures in place.
I have a SIPR machine sitting a foot or 2 away from me right now as I type this on a NIPR machine... SIPR is a completely separate network that never touches the Internet. They both are monitored very heavily and if traffic from one showed up on the other, it would get noticed very quickly and fixed. It would be bad and heads would roll, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.
The U.S. military world wide has setups not unlike this, it's nothing new in the slightest, along with appropriate systems and procedures to protect them.
I use to work on Kwajalein, and have a friend who was in mission control all day... I can guarantee you they had a lot of VERY expensive camera systems and radar keeping an eye on that launch. I doubt much if any of that data will ever be made public however.
As for the "anomaly" thing, the rocket didn't blow up, they hit the big red panic button to blow it up rather than have one large toxic rocket possibly land on something important (although one of the main reasons the Kwajalein Atoll is used, is because there's not much out there, that and the physics advantages of being near the equator).
I can't help you Canada, but can relay my experiences from Afghanistan.
512 down 128 up dedicated, 1.2 meter dish (I think, could easily be wrong on the dish), ended up running about $30,000 U.S. a year. About 2 people could fired up Vonage VOIP and get a decent connection, any more than than and things went bad. Ping times were 675-800ms when the link wasn't too saturated. We had upwards to 18 different people sharing the link, so it was often saturated, especially in the evenings.
We looked at several different companies, and found some 256 symmetric shared (duno where the sharing took place, ISP or satellite, or what) connections for a little cheaper, but when we tried those out, they were all but unusable.
Getting decent bandwidth and low latency to the ends of the earth isn't cheap, reliable, or effective. It wouldn't surprise me if the middle of nowhere northern Canada had an equally poor satellite footprint to Afghanistan.
That wouldn't be me would it?
I've got a ReadyNAS NV+ (formerly Infrant, now Netgear) and really like it. I'll happily recommend it to anybody. Prices after the Netgear buyout went up a bit, but it's still a decent option if you can afford it.
Their forums have lots of good technical moderators who interact a lot. It runs Linux under the hood, and they will happily tell you how to tweak things that can't really be officially supported. Netgear hasn't seemed to mess up the good support and online community Infrant got started from what I can tell.
I had the power supply die, and they RMA'd it quickly. When I got the replacement back I had some issues with getting it to recognize my old disks (OS version for the new NAS was lower than the one from the old NAS, and you need the disks in the NAS when you upgrade it as things get written to flash and the disks).
It's very quite and doesn't use nearly as much juice as a real PC, and can be officially or unofficial setup to serve HTTP, SSH, pull BitTorrent, serve streaming media & piles of other stuff.
Bullet proof vests are made out of Kevlar and other fabrics and they rate pretty high on the kinetic energy resistance scale. I'd much rather have a Kevlar vest than a steel vest of the same weight for protection not even considering the mobility restrictions on the steel.
A good Kevlar vest will stop most handgun rounds... your average car door won't stop much of any kind of bullet.
Actually VMware is the exact wrong way to go (although it does rock for many purposes). If your looking to put up a server farm for "web 2.0" apps, you want to have each box running as close to 100% efficiency with no extra overhead (VMware). As you scale up in a modular environment you'll gladly trade off the flexibility that VMware gives you for more efficiency. Redundant boxes provides high availability rather than extra software.
Specing hardware for an application farm usually means piles of blades or 1U boxes, depending on the application you probably don't even need redundant hardware, just replace the failed hardware and rebuild from scratch. If your going VMware you'll end up specing bigger mega CPU boxes with massive RAM.
In smaller shops where you require more flexibility to run servers/services that don't require farms VMware gives you a better bang for your buck. Nothing beats VMware for R&D either.
What do you call a doctor that graduated at the bottom of his class at medical school?
Doctor.
The grades you get in the higher education system really don't have much relevance to anything outside of higher education.
Once your out of school and have any experience under your belt, your degree just becomes a check box. You could almost get a bachelors in underwater basket weaving and leverage it as much as a good CS degree. They just check to see that you have the degree, which is an indication of ability to continue learning as much as skill in a given discipline.
All that being said, which one do you think you'll get the most out of. Which will make you a better learner or human being? As a CS student, all the details you learn in college will be mostly obsolete very quickly, but the underlying theories and the ability to keep learning will last a lifetime.
Me, yesterday. It's about $0.70 a gallon and is only 2-4 KD ($7-15) to fill up my car. Of course I'm living in Kuwait at the moment and not back home in the states.
Sadly a case of bottled water (don't drink the tap water here, it's often brownish) is around $6. So the 1-2 gallons of water can cost more than filling up my car on some days.
Top Secret data is in the hands of lots of military contractors. If you handle TS data you have to comply with lots of REALLY overkill security measures. Secret classified data must be kept on SIPR net, which is a huge worldwide network massively encrypted and not connected to the Internet. TS is even more secure.
We actually have a case of thermite grenades sitting in our TCF (where all our communications gear & servers sit). Of course there's also the thousand odd soldiers with M16s around that you have to get through first. Sitting in downtown Kabul Afghanistan and needing all that physical security does make me a bit nervous at times though.
Probably the best present my parents ever got me and my brother was our cat, and later over the years hamsters, gerbils & guinea pigs. However they made an informed decision and planned for all the responsibility that went along with it. Pets help build immune systems in growing kids, don't ask me why, google it, there have been studies. It amazes me how much companionship, stress relief and quality of life improvement pets can bring to a family They also provide a good education on responsibility if the parents properly supervise the kids taking care of the pet.
But remember:
If your unsure about your ability to care for a pet properly, don't do it. Start small if you need to, goldfish are about as low maintenance as you can get, if you or your kid can't keep one alive, the ASPCA would be after you if you got something furry and four legged. If you can handle a fish, then think about a hamster, they are cute, reasonably easy to care for, and not as longterm of a commitment as a cat or dog.
My wife and I are in Afghanistan for the year, and leaving our kitty was probably one of the harder things to do. However she is being well cared for by my in-laws who already had a couple cats that our kitty grew up with.http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff. html is a really good read on how the shuttle software is actually made. It's the most reliable software in the world with the most exacting design process.
How many other groups can deliver a half million lines of code with only 1 error (and no, not this issue. And as far as this being an error or bug, it really isn't. It's a know design restriction on a system that just works. Do you really want to go redesign a large chunk and possibly introduce life threatening bugs, or work within the known design window for the system.
I have been living & working overseas for going on 8 years now as a defense contractor. If you have technical skills (more field skills than development), a passport, and a security clearance or the clean record required to get one.
Only American citizens can get a security clearance these days, so the industry is pretty much immune to outsourcing. However working with the government & military means a lot of BS and sometimes not so great living conditions. Depending on where you are looking to go, the pay is good to great, and frequently you don't have to pay taxes or living expenses.
Originally I heard about a job with Raytheon on some tropical island in the Central Pacific, applied, and eventually got hired as an entry level computer technician. Once I got on as a tech working for the contractor that ran the Army base there, they got me my security clearance. Seven years and a big contract change over for the primary contractor running the base I decided to look for greener pastures.
Posting on military related boards along with a good resume and a security clearance ended up yielding quite a few job leads, mostly in the middle east, but some in Germany and other parts of Europe as well.
Right now my wife and I are living on an Army base in Kabul, Afghanistan. each of us is making over double what I'd expect to be making in the states, add to that, no taxes, free room and board, and pretty much minimal if any other expenses and it's quite lucrative. Living conditions aren't that bad, but are much lower than I'd have in the states. We were living in tents for several weeks.
Personally I feel safer here than I would in certain parts of the states. A lot of it depends on where you end up. It's defiantly not for everybody, and you have to be reasonably flexible to deal with all the BS.
I feel quite patriotic for what I do, despite not having lived in the states for almost 8 years. I'm not in the military, but I'm doing my best to give our troops good IT support, which helps our country. Weather we should be over here or not (For the record, I think we should be here in Afghanistan at least), our troops deserve the best support they can get.
A lot of posts have mentioned thing about worries due to sexual harassment problems. The 2 most well adjusted females in our IT department have managed to fit in pretty well pretty quickly. Whether intentionally or more likely just because of their nature they made it very obvious where they stood on sexual harassment issues. Some dirty jokes, lots of hanging out and BSing and it became pretty evident what you could or couldn't do.
Make it obvious, or even flat out state it. I will be annoyed and speak with you first if you do ??? and if you don't stop, I'll bring it up with management. If you do ??? It's going to management right away. Draw your line in the sand on what you will and won't accept. Some people think boundaries were made to be broken, but most of us are pretty content as long as we know where we stand and what we can get away with safely.
On a similar note, never date a co-worker, especially in the same department. I've seen it happen many times, and only once it didn't end very badly for everybody involved. It can hurt your career.
On a more general note, just be yourself. Find out what the cliques are, I'm probably in the gamer, geek, jetskiier & IT guys who have been around a long time cliques (each one has at least 1 female that I'd include as part of the clique). In each of the cliques, I have something in common with the other members, and more often than not we end up talking about stuff relating to the clique.
You may or may not end up having anything in common with the cliques, and it's probably best to not force yourself into them. If people are a gearhead clique, and your not at all into automotive stuff, trying to hang out with them will just end up making you feel like a 3rd wheel to both sides.
Find people who have something in common with you, often just being a fellow IT person can be enough. Be yourself, and let people know who you are and where you stand.
I'm an army contractor in charge of securing non-secret systems.
.mil address). That may or may not even be the appropiate document, depending on your orginazation.
You need to find the regulations for your orginization (Army Regulation 25-2 for us), and read it. If you don't know that regulation well, and improperly impliment things according to that regulation (which may or may not follow normal security protocols) you can be held crimialy and legally liable.
All that being said, most of that security is all software configuration & auditing, not hardware. Lots of Classified/secret stickers and sometimes removable disks is the only hardware differences.
Slashdot is not the right place to be asking about DoD specific policies. It may be the right forum to ask about generic IT policies, but not the arcane policies of a specific buracuracy.
Army Regulation 25-2, the Army regulation for Information Processing is located at http://www.usapa.army.mil/pdffiles/r25_2.pdf (may only be accessable if your on a
That does't stop our cat... at least once a week we hear this Bzzzzzt sound as she stuffs her paw into the power supply fan. Apparently she thinks it's entertaining.
Actually the built in graphics card is plugged into the AGP slot (hard wired in, not physicaly in) 99% of the time. You can't have 2 cards in the same slot and there's only 1 AGP slot per motherboard. You could always use the built in video and a PCI video card... if you can still find one.
I have a 2 year old Sony 18" LCD, probably with a 25ms refresh. It's worked great for everything from Half-Life and Doom 3 to DVD's. Personally I'm never planning on buying another CRT again (monitor, or TV), the new lightweight LCD's and rear projection TV's are the way to go.
On average a battery will last around 2-3 years, tops.
The primary cause to battery failure is sulfitization (sp?) where sulfer crystals form on the battery plates and block the normal battery chemical reactions. This occurs MUCH faster when the battery is not 100% charged. The best thing you can do for any battery is keep it on a trickle charger, which most if not all UPS's do.
If you rarely loose power, normal batteries might be a cheaper choice for similar results. Deep cycle batteries have thicker plates for more durability, and are less likely to have the plates damaged when heavily drained. They sacrafice capacity and avalable amprage for this extra durability. Standard automotive batteries are designed to pretty much never get drawn below 70% capacity.
Unless your into some serious hardware hacking though, I'd stick with something nearly the same as the UPS is speced for.
Aeron's rock, I bought one for use at home and have never regetted it.
They are definatly not the cheapest option out there, but compared to the money most of us toss at computers every year or 2, it's very worth while. It's a very well constructed chair, and I expect mine to last over 10 years (only minor scuffing after 2 so far).
$1,000-2,000 every 1-2 years for a new computer, compared to $600 ever 10 years for a spine saving chair. If you start looking at the numbers it gets a lot easier to push off an upgrade for a little bit to pay for a new chair.
No chair is going to compare with a properly laid out ergonomically correct workstation though. Taking a break to get up, rest your eyes and strech a bit will do more for your body than a $600 chair ever will.