Actually, I recall when having a MBTI test (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) that of the 16 personality types, being told that there is a considerable skew of people in the armed forces to being ESTJ or ISTJ.
Generally those people who are Intuitive, Feeling and Perceiving (as characterised by the MBTI, which isn't necessarily the same as what you might think those words mean) don't "fit in" as well with the usual type of person needed in the armed forces.
There have been studies done on this (google it) and it makes sense that the armed forces isn't the best place for people who place emphasis on feelings, intuition (in the MBTI sense this refers to those who place an emphasis on abstract and theoretical data and future possibilities and insight) and Perceiving (MBTI defines this as being someone who sees the world in shades of grey).
The most common armed forces recruit is generally ESTJ, who is a logical person who deals with physical facts, makes judgements on the world in black and white terms and uses logic. Now it could be argued that's exactly like your average hacker but read a definition of an ESTJ at somewhere like http://www.personalitypage.com/ESTJ.html and you see how nicely that fits your typical soldier type.
There's all sorts of people and no doubt the military may have some places for pretty much any kind of person, but on average the ESTJs are what they need/want it seems.
Of course this isn't necessarily the best way to characterise people anyway, but it gives a good feel that the military don't really want just any old person. A lot of people I know are ENTP (like me) or INFP and you just know they wouldn't fit in a military command structure. Heaven knows, most of us have trouble just fitting in with a corporate lifestyle!
Actually space probes to Mars are sterilised. Those probes that are not destined to land on other planets are not sterilised, however in cases like Galileo the probe was sent down in a "fatal maneuver" on Europa, hopefully destroying any bacteria on board,
Another reason these kinds of sites rarely make a decent match (what percentage of people find their true love through these sites? I'd guess it's way below 0.1%) is that people describe 1) who they'd like to meet, and 2) what they're like.
Let's look at these two points a bit more:
1) Describing who you'd like to meet can be a tricky thing. Just because you like reading SF, hacking kernel drivers and maintaining your fanzine website doesn't mean your best match has the same interests. Or do you really want a 5'8" blond bombshell with a uni degree living within 30 minutes of your house? Maybe the person you're best suited to (ie, whom you'd both be happiest with) is very different from what you suspect. This leads to the next point.
2) Do you really know what you're like as a person? Sure, pretty much everyone has some idea, but describing yourself as a kernel hacker who likes C++ and Perl might (in some people's minds) not convey the fact that many geeks are very good at conversation and often have a brilliant sense of humour. Or maybe you think you are quiet but in reality with the right partner you'd be a very outgoing kind of guy.
Perhaps if you knew yourself a bit better you'd be more open to meeting someone outside your initial preconceived ideas of what you'd like and you could be pleasantly surprised.
In some ways facebook with it's little tests is more objective, but then you still don't know if you're best suited to someone with similar test answers. I'm sure there's been psychological testing done on couples to determine factors that make a relationship work. I recall recent news items on tests for how people manage conflict was a strong indicator on whether they got divorced in the following years or not - something like that is needed.
And just as a footnote: this is exactly what happened to me. After fruitless online dates for quite a while I met someone who really didn't match my criteria (in some ways I'd never dared to match with someone so attractive and in other ways she was way outside what I would consider - ie school dropout (though now has more qualifications than me!), not from the same city, v widely travelled, age difference too great etc). The result is 7+ years of bliss and getting better by the day, married and still enjoying our differences (and often learning and growing because of those differences). In short, allow the unexpected to happen and it just might. The corollary being if you're not ready for something unexpected then maybe you're not ready period.
I friend of mine when back at uni used to regularly clean all the finger grease off his calculator by scrubbing it in a bucket of soapy water with no ill effects. Once after a particularly back engineering exam he threw it against the wall and kicked it down a flight of stairs. It didn't improve his results but he felt better and the calculator was fine.
Losing even 100 people is a major embarrassment but I think more than 500 or so is a real "ass kicking". How many US military killed in Iraq so far? How many civilians?
From where the rest of the world sits (ie, not in the US) it's a absolutely thorough ass kicking.
This reminds me of the movie "The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066302/ from the 70s where a guy is voted into power in England with the policy that every government decision will go to a public referendum.
Very soon every person in England is inundated with documents describing all sorts of obscure government issues like how to respond to a tense diplomatic situation in a some obscure African country that no-one's heard of before. There a great scene of this couple in their working class flat, smoking cigarettes in their nightclothes, working their way through huge piles of questions.
It makes the point in a humorous way that your average person neither cares nor is capable of understanding a lot of the issues that politicians are required to decide upon (and take responsibility for). Sure, some people do care and are capable of understanding the issues and even have the time to investigate and make an informed decision. But that's a huge minority and possible a skewered cross section of the general population (though it's not immediately obvious in which way they're skewed, or to which party).
I started playing AD&D after buying the "original" D&D manuals (just the photocopied books plus some multi sided die) in a games shop in London in 1977. It took a couple of years to come up with our own rules and I started playiong regularly in about 1980. Now I still have a favourite character from about 1983 who is level 3. He's a great bloke (a bit thick and slow, but pretty strong) and he loves to amble around vast lands and has garnered quite a reupation in the last 20 odd years. The DM for the campaign writes a nice little magazine that has tried to capture some of the explits but the point is, after all this time my character is only level 3.
Compare this to WoW where, for instance, my son got to level 60 in about a month then wondered what to do.
It seems a little more attention to gameplay rather than levelling might reingigorate a whole new generation of players - they just might have to use their imaginations though:-)
Mind you, Blizzard will say they're making quite enough money thanks and they don't need to deviate from their current path and I can't blame them from a monetary point of view. [sigh]
Zoids would be good - I expecially liked the first two series, Chaotic Century and Guardian Force. They have pretty good story lines whilst the later series are so-so to my mind.
And of course, Zoids provide another great chance to revive the mechanidise spinoffs too. I couldn't help but be impressed by the mechanical complexity of the Liger I bought my son for his 8th birthday some years ago - it was a lot of fun, even if it did take a whole day to build:-)
So this poor sod's experience is that as he's been getting older, sex has been getting worse and worse??? My own experience is that it just keeps getting better and better. I think you'll find a lot of older women (ie 30,40+) will tell you that an experienced, mature man is far more satisfying than a young stud with a great body who finishes in 2 minutes, has no idea how to please a woman and thinks he's the centre of the universe.
That's just my opinion of course, I'm sure some people's bodies do go downhill and they don't look after themselves and they don't learn from their experiences and they don't grow emotionally so that sex does indeed, get worse.
If I were advising young guys it'd be all about how to pay attention, learn, please and enjoy, year after year after year.
I'm reminded of the joke about an old bulll and a young bull walking over a grassy hill together and they see a herd of cows. The young bull gets all excited and starts jumping around and says, "Let's go running down there and take some of those cows!" The old bull chews some grass and thinks for a bit then says, "Let's just walk down there sonny and then we'll take the whole damn lot of 'em!"
I'm reminded of the WW2 coverup when the Japanese bombed Darwin (the most northern city in Australia). More bombs were dropped than on Pearl Harbour, however, the government of the day wanted to keep it quiet so the media (radio, newspapers) was not allowed to broadcast the story and a much watered down version appeared eventually and it was largely forgotten or dismissed with the reasoning "If something that significant happened we would have heard about it - after all, look at all the fuss made by the US for the bombing of Pearl Harbour! If it happened to Australia even worse then we'd know about it!"
Nice reasoning - just completely wrong. The gevernment can and does cover up things, right in front of our noses, all the time. Usually it's just gross ineptness (ie funding bungles, misuse of funds etc), however I know an eged couple from Bremen (in Germany) who still to this day do not believe any of the stories about the Germans and the Nazis - their arguement is that they were there and they didn't see any of the "so called' atrocities against Jews - hence, for them, it's all lies and never happened.
On the other hand it shows people will believed what they want to believe. I really do think people want there to be aliens - hence the stories will abound, tru or not.
I read pretty much all his novels that I could lay my hands on back in my early teen years, so his writing fitted perfectly with that young adolescent age "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" and "Day After Tomorrow" are classic examples. I tried re-reading some of his books when Friday, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls etc came out when I was in my 20s. I didn't like any of it by then. I tried rereading Citizen of the Galaxy and didn't like that anymore, sadly. Methuslea's Children was great but I think as an adult I'm just too critical in my thinking to tolerate the naivety (whilst I don't mind Cyrano de Bergerac). By the time Starship Stroopers came out as a movie I was kind of glad they'd edited out some of the whacky bits of the story and many people I know didn't understand the whacky ideas that stayed in there.
I think Heinlein inspired many youngsters when space travel was a wonderful promise that we thought was within our grasp when we grew up. Young people today know that there are no aliens living on Mars or Venus and the idea of setting up farms on Ganymede is just dumb and they know when they grow up there might be a handful of people in space and that's it. It just doesn't appeal to the younger generation. And for we sadly grounded and rational thinking adults it has lost it's appeal too. We've all been brought down to earth and despite the best efforts of X-cor or Armadillo we'll all still be on earth for a long time to come. It's a sad truth that kids today know and it's the adults who have trouble letting go of those aspirations (I'm generalising but I see a lot of Gen Y ppl who don't understand the adventurous spirit of the Boomers).
What Heinlein does keep for me is a wonderful memory and feeling that "this is possible". It gave me great dreams to grow up with and aspire to, which made me strive to achieve in maths and science because a dream is a powerful thing. I know it's not true now, but that doesn't detract from the feelings I remember which after 30 odd years are still so strong. And it is for that reason that Heinlein deserves a great place in the annals of SF writers.
Civil engineers generall build dams and flood mitigation structures to withstand the so called 50 year flood. This means we expect a major flood ever 50 years and better spend the money to guard against it. Statistics show that there are large floods (anywhere) over a longer period, I think they use 75 or 100 years. We don't build structure or cities to withstand these. Well, in the case of London's tidal barrier they hoped it would handle these, same for Hollands zyders (dykes). Of course there are exception like New Orleans where the statistical risk of flooding in 50 years was not acted upon.
So we say it's worth spending the money on protecting against something that might happen in 50 years and that's accepted. The cost of the extra construction is most likely amortorised long before the actual flood hits.
Now for global warming look at what will flood in those 50yr storms if the sea level is now 1 or 7metres higher. How much will that cost to protect against. Sure, there's a huge difference in what structure we build (sea walls etc). I'm sure local and federal governments can work out the costs for each coastal city, industry and farm.
Let's see, a $200m seawall (don't ay it's not practicval because Holland has a seawall around the whole conutry just about, look at a map) or 2m lives or a city lost. How much did New Orleans cost?
What's the worst that can happen? A small percentage of rich ppl with ocean front homes lose their view, shipping ports need to be modified, we all breath cleaner air (what does just asthma cost per year in any given country to say nothing of other pollution related illnesses?)
It's the usual painful realisation that we got it wrong first time and now we have to fix things up and need to do it right.
It wouldn't surprise me if we have more disasters yet (floods, droughts) before people realise the changes are beyond the norm of accurately measured climactic conditions - ie the last 100yrs or so). It might be too late to prevent further changes but at least ppl/govts will be scared and hurt enough to clean up their acts so we breath better.
Global warming might take a long time to reverse if it's already underway, but clean air can come very quickly. Overall it's not a small price that has to be paid, it's a significant price, but the outcome of acting far outweighs the situation if we don't act.
Not everyone is cut out for management though. You might be happier programming. Or get into systems analysis or design. Do some contract work interstate or better yet overseas for a year or two.
When I read an applicants resume I'm impressed by their working in a number of industries or projects at least, overseas experience is highly regarded because it means you're independent and willing to do something unusual to increase your experience. An MBA doesn't hurt if you want to get into management and the stuff you learn gives you a broader perspective anyway which employers like.
Companies are still working out how to handle Gen Y people who want it all by the time they're 25 or they'll go elsewhere. Spend a year or two in each job or employers view it as you had to move on for some reason you're not saying.
I've seen graduates work 3-4 years in one job then a year or 2 here and there. At that point they either do private consulting/contracting or settle down because they realise they want a family/house etc and need that stability.
Some companies only hire ppl in their 30s because any younger than that and you're too unpredictable and are just as likely to leave at the drop of a hat. Others take on the graduates only to have them leave time and again once they're trained up and just getting useful (which usually take 4-9 months).
There are companies that reward experienced, good programmers fairly well. It will never be as much as managers get (unless you're in Germany, where engineers are always seen as being more important than managers).
It's not always about the money though. And consider that managers also work long hours under considerable stress at times. The grass isn't always greener on the other side once you get there.
Challenge yourself with something difficult. I don't mean writing a new Compiler or RPG. Something you actually need or would like to have.
Projects I worked on included writing - a small RT OS for it to interface to my computer to perform maths routines faster, all programmed in assembler and later in C. - a multiuser 3D based engine (including all the 3D rendering and lighting routines - this was in the early 90s) in C and assembler - a python based server monitoring system with awk and perl agents - a neural net based artificial life form in C++ (it didn't work but I learnt a lot!)
There were lots more but these took from a few months to a few years to complete. Each one required going off and researching algorithms and software design and languages. The actual experience gained was used in later jobs and I've used the above items in my resume and it has helped because some employers have seen those and realised that's just what they need (though they never advertised the fact).
Also, use other people's code as examples or starting points. I learnt a heck of a lot trolling through apache or freeciv or Small-C or so many other things just trying to find some code that did what I wanted or trying to mould a program to my own purposes.
It is critical to learn how to write well laid out and documented code too and how to craft a good Makefile.
Now if you're going to do SQL coding for a living or.NET C# then some of this doesn't apply. In general though, I'd say getting experience in working systems in a number of languages is very useful as it teaches you to design a program in general, rather than how to do something specific in a set language. Good programmers are good in any language.
Make sure the hobby projects are things you'll actually use yourself, so you will learn to maintain code and will get annoyed if it has bugs. Better still, make it something other people use too so they'll tell you about the aweful UI you design or the bugs you'd never find yourself.
Meetings. When I had a startup games company money was pretty scarce. We went to E3 and met all the major publishers and did our presentations. It would be 3 days straight of meetings, negotiations, presentations as well as meeting other people in the same boat as us and learning from their experiences.
Actually visiting the booths was a distractions from the real business of E3.
If you went to E3 as a consumer you probably don't see all the meeting rooms where deals are done (those long boring quiet corridors upstairs with the closed doors). For us it was the chance to visit so many companies and meet people face to face that we could never do otherwise if we had to travel all around the country and overseas to meet them.
If we're going to be true to last century then that should be "aether" from the Greek "aither". It originally meant the upper air that was breathed by the Olympian gods (thanks to my physics teacher in year 11 back in '79).
How is it that you're obviously spending a huge amount on the network infrastructure and want to cut costs so much on network monitoring? After going to all the effort of setting up you'll want a decent tool that tells you the instant something is wrong - and before the users tell you!
Something like HP OpenView does the job. Cisco have a sw tool but not as good, as do Sunand IBM. CA Unicentre is overkill and too expensive to my mind. For small jobs (less than 100 nodes) I've used Ipswitch Whatsup Professional. You want something that goes inside your switches and has agents for all your servers if you want to monitor properly.
In the dim past (10+yrs ago) I used Scotty (a Tcl/Tk freeware tool) and at other times wrote my own in Python/TK with Perl daemons/services.
net-snmp on sourceforge has tools you can use but to my mind these days, again I'd say - it's an expensive (and I presume important) network your've got there, so spend some money to monitor it properly. The expensive tools ($30k+) all have ready made agents or know about a huge variety of hw so you don't have to customise MIBs and code (though Unicentre takes a lot of customisation to work well and they all need customisation of sorts). It might take you 3 months to do a half decent job coding yourself that a commercial package could do with more features in a few weeks and you've got support and someone to complain to if there're problems. How much money would be lost when the network goes down in those three months? Just one hour for a large corporation would cover the cost of the sw.
I do agree it's great fun rolling your own (I'm sure you're a great programmer) if you have the time and the corporate managers don't appreciate the need to monitor things properly and you can't convince them to spend the dollars - but when it goes down it'll be your arse and the managers'/company's money being lost while you sweat to fix things - they'll quickly tell you then (and rightly so) it would have been worth doing it right the first time (you didn't think they'd take the heat for this now did you?) no matter how good your code will look in just another months time.
At worst write some emails as evidence that you requested such and such a package with official quotes and have their replies on record they refused to spend the money on it. I know of one company that went to the wall when the network went down (chain of retail stores) and a series of seemingly small faults on critical days (like the last shopping days before christmas) meant the company went under and the IT consultants who designed the system took the blame in court in the end - cost them $30m (plus a few hundred ppl lost jobs).
Now if this is just some academic network or it's not your responsibility then fine (mind you many research places are even more fussy about their networks than corporate users).
Unfortunately there are times when jumping into coding, nomatter how well intentioned, isn't the most pragmatic or best solution.
Before we convince the whole English speaking world to change, how about we wait for the US to convert to metric instead of using the old English Imperial system?
Then once hell has frozen over we can think about changing english spelling.
One other problem with changing spelling is we are purposely removing connections to the roots of the words. Often the spelling of a word tells us a lot about it's meaning (if we are unsure) and hints at subtlties that will be lost if we move to phonetic spelling. In fact often the "odd" spelling of some words is because of the original derivation of words.
English is very good at "absorbing" words from other languages and with that often comes unusual spelling which, however, provides valuable insight into underlying meanings.
For small changes you can generally guesstimate from exerience with that system. If you know the code well there's a better chance of being accurate. If you have to wade through someone else's code you don't know then be very generous (generally double your guess).
With all but the most trivial changes you need something in writing to confirm what is wanted - even just an email to restate what you talked about and put your estimate in writing. Get in the habit of this. You can talk about it then look at the code for 30minutes and make a far better estimate than being pressuried into giving an answer straight away.
On much larger projects the time spent on actual coding gets less and less and the time spend on specifications, prototypes, testing, documenting, reviewing etc gets much bigger. I recently worked on a $250m sw project where coding was about 20-25% of the time. It depends on what the code is for. Normally coding is about 40% of a project but the more critical a system the less time spent on code and the more spent on design and testing. I've worked on some safety critical systems (ie where someone dies if your code is wrong) and coding was about 10% of the project. This might take a lot of joy out of being a programmer but it pays to get it right!
I have separate user accounts that my kids use and about 1/2 of their games don't work. So when I let them log in on an account with admin priv to run their games they invariably exit the game and do "web stuff" later on and the next day I sit down to do work and there's all sorts of crud installed.
Recent games (the last couple of years) are behaving better eg World's of Warcraft runs as a regular user but previous Blizzard games didn't. The Sims2 runs as a user but puts multi 100 megs of files in each users profile.
You have to find out what programs ppl will be using. Many CAD/Animation packages need to be administrator to run. If it's just Office or websurfing then user admin accounts are fine and safer (and as you say, the user is less likely to screw things up).
I had thought to allow the kids their own computer each and they can do whatever they want as administrator, but the time taken fixing their machines and the bandwidth taken by malicious sw meant it wasn't worth it so I quickly gave up on that idea.
The reason the outer layer of most pyramids at Giza is gone (though in some cases it wasn't there in the first place) is because it was pilfered by builders in nearby Cairo to make buildings. On Khafre's pyramid the only bit they didn't steal is the bit at the very top that is still there and in pretty good shape (the white "cap" you see on the top). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza about halfway down the page is a good pic and some text about the marble outer casing.
A friend who lived in Cairo says you can easily identify the buildings that used the casing marble - it's obviously lasted 6000years with no trouble. A quick call to a geologist friend assures me a block of marble will last a few 10s of millions years at least if it's not disturbed (ie rain on too much or submerged). No doubt the pyramid would not retain it's shape over that time (earthquakes, subsoil subsiding etc) however I reckon you'd still have a number of block with suspiciously square corners.
Unfortunately many apps on Windows need admin permission to run, especially in the CAD and 3D Animation world (Modellers, Renderers, Compositors etc). They're slowly being updated and pulled into line but it'll be many years away.
Tcl/tk is very small and fast to develop with. Comments elsewhere mention how it can be made into a single EXE. I've used ActiveState Tcl to make standalone exes. In a few hundred lines I wrote a realtime industrial monitoring system with graphs and popups and all sorts - accessing data via sockets but serial ports is easy too.
For slightly easier to read code (and maintain later on) I've used python with tk to monitor a network in realtime linked to perl/awk socket servers that gather data in a dozen lines. It takes a bit more code but may be easier for others to pick up on after you. Python is big to distrib though there's probably some product to make standalone exes like with tcl.
I hate to say it but this is pretty darn good. If starting from scratch then this is easier than open source solution and cleaner and more integrated. Sharepoint brings together exchange, web stuff, calendars, share and individual todo lists etc in a fairly new and integrated way and is very fast. Underneath it's mostly the same Exchange and Active Directory stuff. We just rolled it out to 450 people over multiple sites and it was painless - just needs some design work up front for how to organise data.
Novell Groupwise is good too, I've managed it on a large multisite company but generally you'd only choose it if you already had Novell servers. I haven't used it in the last 5 years so maybe it's much better now though I doubt it.
I have less experience of Lotus notes (set it up over a large network but never actually used it much) and would say it much more complex than the MS solution - though it's a slightly different tool and probably has greater functionality. Great if you're an IBM shop and fairly easy to get training or consultants who know it - though they're more expensive than Novell or MS consultants.
I've looked numerous times for solutions that cover unixes (linux, sun, sgi etc) and windows and there's no simple solution. So if you're a PC shop running windows clients then MS is the most integrated solution with the best support.
If the thre separate companies are already on linux or Sun servers with good unix admin skills inhouse then one of the OS solutions would be more cost effective though would require more time to set up.
I remember the story in New Scientist on a computer program to simulate hardness of crystal structures was let loose and strnagely suggested carbon nitride C3N4 was the hardest. The researchers were checking their program and expected diamond to come up the hardest. It's very hard to make though.
A search in Google finds a reference here, section 4.11, which shows this happened in 1989. It's nice to know my memory is still working:-)
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Actually, I recall when having a MBTI test (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) that of the 16 personality types, being told that there is a considerable skew of people in the armed forces to being ESTJ or ISTJ.
Generally those people who are Intuitive, Feeling and Perceiving (as characterised by the MBTI, which isn't necessarily the same as what you might think those words mean) don't "fit in" as well with the usual type of person needed in the armed forces.
There have been studies done on this (google it) and it makes sense that the armed forces isn't the best place for people who place emphasis on feelings, intuition (in the MBTI sense this refers to those who place an emphasis on abstract and theoretical data and future possibilities and insight) and Perceiving (MBTI defines this as being someone who sees the world in shades of grey).
The most common armed forces recruit is generally ESTJ, who is a logical person who deals with physical facts, makes judgements on the world in black and white terms and uses logic. Now it could be argued that's exactly like your average hacker but read a definition of an ESTJ at somewhere like http://www.personalitypage.com/ESTJ.html and you see how nicely that fits your typical soldier type.
There's all sorts of people and no doubt the military may have some places for pretty much any kind of person, but on average the ESTJs are what they need/want it seems.
Of course this isn't necessarily the best way to characterise people anyway, but it gives a good feel that the military don't really want just any old person. A lot of people I know are ENTP (like me) or INFP and you just know they wouldn't fit in a military command structure. Heaven knows, most of us have trouble just fitting in with a corporate lifestyle!
Actually space probes to Mars are sterilised. Those probes that are not destined to land on other planets are not sterilised, however in cases like Galileo the probe was sent down in a "fatal maneuver" on Europa, hopefully destroying any bacteria on board,
Another reason these kinds of sites rarely make a decent match (what percentage of people find their true love through these sites? I'd guess it's way below 0.1%) is that people describe 1) who they'd like to meet, and 2) what they're like.
Let's look at these two points a bit more:
1) Describing who you'd like to meet can be a tricky thing. Just because you like reading SF, hacking kernel drivers and maintaining your fanzine website doesn't mean your best match has the same interests. Or do you really want a 5'8" blond bombshell with a uni degree living within 30 minutes of your house? Maybe the person you're best suited to (ie, whom you'd both be happiest with) is very different from what you suspect. This leads to the next point.
2) Do you really know what you're like as a person? Sure, pretty much everyone has some idea, but describing yourself as a kernel hacker who likes C++ and Perl might (in some people's minds) not convey the fact that many geeks are very good at conversation and often have a brilliant sense of humour. Or maybe you think you are quiet but in reality with the right partner you'd be a very outgoing kind of guy.
Perhaps if you knew yourself a bit better you'd be more open to meeting someone outside your initial preconceived ideas of what you'd like and you could be pleasantly surprised.
In some ways facebook with it's little tests is more objective, but then you still don't know if you're best suited to someone with similar test answers. I'm sure there's been psychological testing done on couples to determine factors that make a relationship work. I recall recent news items on tests for how people manage conflict was a strong indicator on whether they got divorced in the following years or not - something like that is needed.
And just as a footnote: this is exactly what happened to me. After fruitless online dates for quite a while I met someone who really didn't match my criteria (in some ways I'd never dared to match with someone so attractive and in other ways she was way outside what I would consider - ie school dropout (though now has more qualifications than me!), not from the same city, v widely travelled, age difference too great etc). The result is 7+ years of bliss and getting better by the day, married and still enjoying our differences (and often learning and growing because of those differences). In short, allow the unexpected to happen and it just might. The corollary being if you're not ready for something unexpected then maybe you're not ready period.
I friend of mine when back at uni used to regularly clean all the finger grease off his calculator by scrubbing it in a bucket of soapy water with no ill effects. Once after a particularly back engineering exam he threw it against the wall and kicked it down a flight of stairs. It didn't improve his results but he felt better and the calculator was fine.
Times have moved on from WW2 and Vietnam.
Losing even 100 people is a major embarrassment but I think more than 500 or so is a real "ass kicking". How many US military killed in Iraq so far? How many civilians?
From where the rest of the world sits (ie, not in the US) it's a absolutely thorough ass kicking.
This reminds me of the movie "The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066302/ from the 70s where a guy is voted into power in England with the policy that every government decision will go to a public referendum.
Very soon every person in England is inundated with documents describing all sorts of obscure government issues like how to respond to a tense diplomatic situation in a some obscure African country that no-one's heard of before. There a great scene of this couple in their working class flat, smoking cigarettes in their nightclothes, working their way through huge piles of questions.
It makes the point in a humorous way that your average person neither cares nor is capable of understanding a lot of the issues that politicians are required to decide upon (and take responsibility for). Sure, some people do care and are capable of understanding the issues and even have the time to investigate and make an informed decision. But that's a huge minority and possible a skewered cross section of the general population (though it's not immediately obvious in which way they're skewed, or to which party).
It's a funny movie too. Well worth watching.
I started playing AD&D after buying the "original" D&D manuals (just the photocopied books plus some multi sided die) in a games shop in London in 1977. It took a couple of years to come up with our own rules and I started playiong regularly in about 1980. Now I still have a favourite character from about 1983 who is level 3. He's a great bloke (a bit thick and slow, but pretty strong) and he loves to amble around vast lands and has garnered quite a reupation in the last 20 odd years. The DM for the campaign writes a nice little magazine that has tried to capture some of the explits but the point is, after all this time my character is only level 3.
:-)
Compare this to WoW where, for instance, my son got to level 60 in about a month then wondered what to do.
It seems a little more attention to gameplay rather than levelling might reingigorate a whole new generation of players - they just might have to use their imaginations though
Mind you, Blizzard will say they're making quite enough money thanks and they don't need to deviate from their current path and I can't blame them from a monetary point of view. [sigh]
Zoids would be good - I expecially liked the first two series, Chaotic Century and Guardian Force. They have pretty good story lines whilst the later series are so-so to my mind.
:-)
And of course, Zoids provide another great chance to revive the mechanidise spinoffs too. I couldn't help but be impressed by the mechanical complexity of the Liger I bought my son for his 8th birthday some years ago - it was a lot of fun, even if it did take a whole day to build
So this poor sod's experience is that as he's been getting older, sex has been getting worse and worse??? My own experience is that it just keeps getting better and better. I think you'll find a lot of older women (ie 30,40+) will tell you that an experienced, mature man is far more satisfying than a young stud with a great body who finishes in 2 minutes, has no idea how to please a woman and thinks he's the centre of the universe.
That's just my opinion of course, I'm sure some people's bodies do go downhill and they don't look after themselves and they don't learn from their experiences and they don't grow emotionally so that sex does indeed, get worse.
If I were advising young guys it'd be all about how to pay attention, learn, please and enjoy, year after year after year.
I'm reminded of the joke about an old bulll and a young bull walking over a grassy hill together and they see a herd of cows. The young bull gets all excited and starts jumping around and says, "Let's go running down there and take some of those cows!" The old bull chews some grass and thinks for a bit then says, "Let's just walk down there sonny and then we'll take the whole damn lot of 'em!"
I'm reminded of the WW2 coverup when the Japanese bombed Darwin (the most northern city in Australia). More bombs were dropped than on Pearl Harbour, however, the government of the day wanted to keep it quiet so the media (radio, newspapers) was not allowed to broadcast the story and a much watered down version appeared eventually and it was largely forgotten or dismissed with the reasoning "If something that significant happened we would have heard about it - after all, look at all the fuss made by the US for the bombing of Pearl Harbour! If it happened to Australia even worse then we'd know about it!"
Nice reasoning - just completely wrong. The gevernment can and does cover up things, right in front of our noses, all the time. Usually it's just gross ineptness (ie funding bungles, misuse of funds etc), however I know an eged couple from Bremen (in Germany) who still to this day do not believe any of the stories about the Germans and the Nazis - their arguement is that they were there and they didn't see any of the "so called' atrocities against Jews - hence, for them, it's all lies and never happened.
On the other hand it shows people will believed what they want to believe. I really do think people want there to be aliens - hence the stories will abound, tru or not.
I read pretty much all his novels that I could lay my hands on back in my early teen years, so his writing fitted perfectly with that young adolescent age "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" and "Day After Tomorrow" are classic examples. I tried re-reading some of his books when Friday, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls etc came out when I was in my 20s. I didn't like any of it by then. I tried rereading Citizen of the Galaxy and didn't like that anymore, sadly. Methuslea's Children was great but I think as an adult I'm just too critical in my thinking to tolerate the naivety (whilst I don't mind Cyrano de Bergerac). By the time Starship Stroopers came out as a movie I was kind of glad they'd edited out some of the whacky bits of the story and many people I know didn't understand the whacky ideas that stayed in there.
I think Heinlein inspired many youngsters when space travel was a wonderful promise that we thought was within our grasp when we grew up. Young people today know that there are no aliens living on Mars or Venus and the idea of setting up farms on Ganymede is just dumb and they know when they grow up there might be a handful of people in space and that's it. It just doesn't appeal to the younger generation. And for we sadly grounded and rational thinking adults it has lost it's appeal too. We've all been brought down to earth and despite the best efforts of X-cor or Armadillo we'll all still be on earth for a long time to come. It's a sad truth that kids today know and it's the adults who have trouble letting go of those aspirations (I'm generalising but I see a lot of Gen Y ppl who don't understand the adventurous spirit of the Boomers).
What Heinlein does keep for me is a wonderful memory and feeling that "this is possible". It gave me great dreams to grow up with and aspire to, which made me strive to achieve in maths and science because a dream is a powerful thing. I know it's not true now, but that doesn't detract from the feelings I remember which after 30 odd years are still so strong. And it is for that reason that Heinlein deserves a great place in the annals of SF writers.
Civil engineers generall build dams and flood mitigation structures to withstand the so called 50 year flood. This means we expect a major flood ever 50 years and better spend the money to guard against it. Statistics show that there are large floods (anywhere) over a longer period, I think they use 75 or 100 years. We don't build structure or cities to withstand these. Well, in the case of London's tidal barrier they hoped it would handle these, same for Hollands zyders (dykes). Of course there are exception like New Orleans where the statistical risk of flooding in 50 years was not acted upon.
So we say it's worth spending the money on protecting against something that might happen in 50 years and that's accepted. The cost of the extra construction is most likely amortorised long before the actual flood hits.
Now for global warming look at what will flood in those 50yr storms if the sea level is now 1 or 7metres higher. How much will that cost to protect against. Sure, there's a huge difference in what structure we build (sea walls etc). I'm sure local and federal governments can work out the costs for each coastal city, industry and farm.
Let's see, a $200m seawall (don't ay it's not practicval because Holland has a seawall around the whole conutry just about, look at a map) or 2m lives or a city lost. How much did New Orleans cost?
What's the worst that can happen? A small percentage of rich ppl with ocean front homes lose their view, shipping ports need to be modified, we all breath cleaner air (what does just asthma cost per year in any given country to say nothing of other pollution related illnesses?)
It's the usual painful realisation that we got it wrong first time and now we have to fix things up and need to do it right.
It wouldn't surprise me if we have more disasters yet (floods, droughts) before people realise the changes are beyond the norm of accurately measured climactic conditions - ie the last 100yrs or so). It might be too late to prevent further changes but at least ppl/govts will be scared and hurt enough to clean up their acts so we breath better.
Global warming might take a long time to reverse if it's already underway, but clean air can come very quickly. Overall it's not a small price that has to be paid, it's a significant price, but the outcome of acting far outweighs the situation if we don't act.
Not everyone is cut out for management though. You might be happier programming. Or get into systems analysis or design. Do some contract work interstate or better yet overseas for a year or two.
When I read an applicants resume I'm impressed by their working in a number of industries or projects at least, overseas experience is highly regarded because it means you're independent and willing to do something unusual to increase your experience. An MBA doesn't hurt if you want to get into management and the stuff you learn gives you a broader perspective anyway which employers like.
Companies are still working out how to handle Gen Y people who want it all by the time they're 25 or they'll go elsewhere. Spend a year or two in each job or employers view it as you had to move on for some reason you're not saying.
I've seen graduates work 3-4 years in one job then a year or 2 here and there. At that point they either do private consulting/contracting or settle down because they realise they want a family/house etc and need that stability.
Some companies only hire ppl in their 30s because any younger than that and you're too unpredictable and are just as likely to leave at the drop of a hat. Others take on the graduates only to have them leave time and again once they're trained up and just getting useful (which usually take 4-9 months).
There are companies that reward experienced, good programmers fairly well. It will never be as much as managers get (unless you're in Germany, where engineers are always seen as being more important than managers).
It's not always about the money though. And consider that managers also work long hours under considerable stress at times. The grass isn't always greener on the other side once you get there.
Challenge yourself with something difficult. I don't mean writing a new Compiler or RPG. Something you actually need or would like to have.
.NET C# then some of this doesn't apply. In general though, I'd say getting experience in working systems in a number of languages is very useful as it teaches you to design a program in general, rather than how to do something specific in a set language. Good programmers are good in any language.
Projects I worked on included writing
- a small RT OS for it to interface to my computer to perform maths routines faster, all programmed in assembler and later in C.
- a multiuser 3D based engine (including all the 3D rendering and lighting routines - this was in the early 90s) in C and assembler
- a python based server monitoring system with awk and perl agents
- a neural net based artificial life form in C++ (it didn't work but I learnt a lot!)
There were lots more but these took from a few months to a few years to complete. Each one required going off and researching algorithms and software design and languages. The actual experience gained was used in later jobs and I've used the above items in my resume and it has helped because some employers have seen those and realised that's just what they need (though they never advertised the fact).
Also, use other people's code as examples or starting points. I learnt a heck of a lot trolling through apache or freeciv or Small-C or so many other things just trying to find some code that did what I wanted or trying to mould a program to my own purposes.
It is critical to learn how to write well laid out and documented code too and how to craft a good Makefile.
Now if you're going to do SQL coding for a living or
Make sure the hobby projects are things you'll actually use yourself, so you will learn to maintain code and will get annoyed if it has bugs. Better still, make it something other people use too so they'll tell you about the aweful UI you design or the bugs you'd never find yourself.
Meetings. When I had a startup games company money was pretty scarce. We went to E3 and met all the major publishers and did our presentations. It would be 3 days straight of meetings, negotiations, presentations as well as meeting other people in the same boat as us and learning from their experiences.
Actually visiting the booths was a distractions from the real business of E3.
If you went to E3 as a consumer you probably don't see all the meeting rooms where deals are done (those long boring quiet corridors upstairs with the closed doors). For us it was the chance to visit so many companies and meet people face to face that we could never do otherwise if we had to travel all around the country and overseas to meet them.
If we're going to be true to last century then that should be "aether" from the Greek "aither". It originally meant the upper air that was breathed by the Olympian gods (thanks to my physics teacher in year 11 back in '79).
How is it that you're obviously spending a huge amount on the network infrastructure and want to cut costs so much on network monitoring? After going to all the effort of setting up you'll want a decent tool that tells you the instant something is wrong - and before the users tell you!
Something like HP OpenView does the job. Cisco have a sw tool but not as good, as do Sunand IBM. CA Unicentre is overkill and too expensive to my mind. For small jobs (less than 100 nodes) I've used Ipswitch Whatsup Professional. You want something that goes inside your switches and has agents for all your servers if you want to monitor properly.
In the dim past (10+yrs ago) I used Scotty (a Tcl/Tk freeware tool) and at other times wrote my own in Python/TK with Perl daemons/services.
net-snmp on sourceforge has tools you can use but to my mind these days, again I'd say - it's an expensive (and I presume important) network your've got there, so spend some money to monitor it properly. The expensive tools ($30k+) all have ready made agents or know about a huge variety of hw so you don't have to customise MIBs and code (though Unicentre takes a lot of customisation to work well and they all need customisation of sorts). It might take you 3 months to do a half decent job coding yourself that a commercial package could do with more features in a few weeks and you've got support and someone to complain to if there're problems. How much money would be lost when the network goes down in those three months? Just one hour for a large corporation would cover the cost of the sw.
I do agree it's great fun rolling your own (I'm sure you're a great programmer) if you have the time and the corporate managers don't appreciate the need to monitor things properly and you can't convince them to spend the dollars - but when it goes down it'll be your arse and the managers'/company's money being lost while you sweat to fix things - they'll quickly tell you then (and rightly so) it would have been worth doing it right the first time (you didn't think they'd take the heat for this now did you?) no matter how good your code will look in just another months time.
At worst write some emails as evidence that you requested such and such a package with official quotes and have their replies on record they refused to spend the money on it. I know of one company that went to the wall when the network went down (chain of retail stores) and a series of seemingly small faults on critical days (like the last shopping days before christmas) meant the company went under and the IT consultants who designed the system took the blame in court in the end - cost them $30m (plus a few hundred ppl lost jobs).
Now if this is just some academic network or it's not your responsibility then fine (mind you many research places are even more fussy about their networks than corporate users).
Unfortunately there are times when jumping into coding, nomatter how well intentioned, isn't the most pragmatic or best solution.
Before we convince the whole English speaking world to change, how about we wait for the US to convert to metric instead of using the old English Imperial system?
Then once hell has frozen over we can think about changing english spelling.
One other problem with changing spelling is we are purposely removing connections to the roots of the words. Often the spelling of a word tells us a lot about it's meaning (if we are unsure) and hints at subtlties that will be lost if we move to phonetic spelling. In fact often the "odd" spelling of some words is because of the original derivation of words.
English is very good at "absorbing" words from other languages and with that often comes unusual spelling which, however, provides valuable insight into underlying meanings.
For small changes you can generally guesstimate from exerience with that system. If you know the code well there's a better chance of being accurate. If you have to wade through someone else's code you don't know then be very generous (generally double your guess).
With all but the most trivial changes you need something in writing to confirm what is wanted - even just an email to restate what you talked about and put your estimate in writing. Get in the habit of this. You can talk about it then look at the code for 30minutes and make a far better estimate than being pressuried into giving an answer straight away.
On much larger projects the time spent on actual coding gets less and less and the time spend on specifications, prototypes, testing, documenting, reviewing etc gets much bigger. I recently worked on a $250m sw project where coding was about 20-25% of the time. It depends on what the code is for. Normally coding is about 40% of a project but the more critical a system the less time spent on code and the more spent on design and testing. I've worked on some safety critical systems (ie where someone dies if your code is wrong) and coding was about 10% of the project. This might take a lot of joy out of being a programmer but it pays to get it right!
I have separate user accounts that my kids use and about 1/2 of their games don't work. So when I let them log in on an account with admin priv to run their games they invariably exit the game and do "web stuff" later on and the next day I sit down to do work and there's all sorts of crud installed.
Recent games (the last couple of years) are behaving better eg World's of Warcraft runs as a regular user but previous Blizzard games didn't. The Sims2 runs as a user but puts multi 100 megs of files in each users profile.
You have to find out what programs ppl will be using. Many CAD/Animation packages need to be administrator to run. If it's just Office or websurfing then user admin accounts are fine and safer (and as you say, the user is less likely to screw things up).
I had thought to allow the kids their own computer each and they can do whatever they want as administrator, but the time taken fixing their machines and the bandwidth taken by malicious sw meant it wasn't worth it so I quickly gave up on that idea.
The reason the outer layer of most pyramids at Giza is gone (though in some cases it wasn't there in the first place) is because it was pilfered by builders in nearby Cairo to make buildings. On Khafre's pyramid the only bit they didn't steal is the bit at the very top that is still there and in pretty good shape (the white "cap" you see on the top). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza about halfway down the page is a good pic and some text about the marble outer casing.
A friend who lived in Cairo says you can easily identify the buildings that used the casing marble - it's obviously lasted 6000years with no trouble. A quick call to a geologist friend assures me a block of marble will last a few 10s of millions years at least if it's not disturbed (ie rain on too much or submerged). No doubt the pyramid would not retain it's shape over that time (earthquakes, subsoil subsiding etc) however I reckon you'd still have a number of block with suspiciously square corners.
Unfortunately many apps on Windows need admin permission to run, especially in the CAD and 3D Animation world (Modellers, Renderers, Compositors etc). They're slowly being updated and pulled into line but it'll be many years away.
Tcl/tk is very small and fast to develop with. Comments elsewhere mention how it can be made into a single EXE. I've used ActiveState Tcl to make standalone exes. In a few hundred lines I wrote a realtime industrial monitoring system with graphs and popups and all sorts - accessing data via sockets but serial ports is easy too.
For slightly easier to read code (and maintain later on) I've used python with tk to monitor a network in realtime linked to perl/awk socket servers that gather data in a dozen lines. It takes a bit more code but may be easier for others to pick up on after you. Python is big to distrib though there's probably some product to make standalone exes like with tcl.
I hate to say it but this is pretty darn good. If starting from scratch then this is easier than open source solution and cleaner and more integrated. Sharepoint brings together exchange, web stuff, calendars, share and individual todo lists etc in a fairly new and integrated way and is very fast. Underneath it's mostly the same Exchange and Active Directory stuff. We just rolled it out to 450 people over multiple sites and it was painless - just needs some design work up front for how to organise data.
Novell Groupwise is good too, I've managed it on a large multisite company but generally you'd only choose it if you already had Novell servers. I haven't used it in the last 5 years so maybe it's much better now though I doubt it.
I have less experience of Lotus notes (set it up over a large network but never actually used it much) and would say it much more complex than the MS solution - though it's a slightly different tool and probably has greater functionality. Great if you're an IBM shop and fairly easy to get training or consultants who know it - though they're more expensive than Novell or MS consultants.
I've looked numerous times for solutions that cover unixes (linux, sun, sgi etc) and windows and there's no simple solution. So if you're a PC shop running windows clients then MS is the most integrated solution with the best support.
If the thre separate companies are already on linux or Sun servers with good unix admin skills inhouse then one of the OS solutions would be more cost effective though would require more time to set up.
I remember the story in New Scientist on a computer program to simulate hardness of crystal structures was let loose and strnagely suggested carbon nitride C3N4 was the hardest. The researchers were checking their program and expected diamond to come up the hardest. It's very hard to make though.
:-)
A search in Google finds a reference here, section 4.11, which shows this happened in 1989. It's nice to know my memory is still working