As the others have said, tailor your resume to emphasize that you are jack-of-all-trades.
I'm a CCIE and have a doctorate in computer networks, have authored an RFC, and now approaching 20 years of experience in the field, which supposedly puts me into the camp of network expert.
Expect, in reality, my work in last six months has consisted of e.g.:
- Database design, operations and reporting (MSSQL and Mysql)
- AJAX programming (Javascript), and all the intricasies that bunch of different Internet Explorer versions mean in practice
- Suddendly familiarizing myself with using hardware load balancers with Microsoft Lync (well, at least somewhat related to networking...)
- Writing a Python-based software for black-box testing microcontrollers
- Deployment, integration and other support work for an Asterisk-based Contact Center/PBX system...yeah, of course there's been the other bits that I'm supposedly better suited for (firewall experties, some dimensioning for network devices, and so on), but the position is pretty officially jack-of-all-trades.
So if you are one, just proudly wear that badge. Of course, it's hard to tailor a resume for buzzword-searching headhunters, but as far as positions are concerned, one of the good signs I've seen for a true "JoaT" job ad is one where there are very few *specific* requirements (only something like "experienced in the field") is listed, and then in the "this counts as an advantage" column they have every acronym under the sun...means they don't really have a specialist position in mind, and might mean that they don't actually know what the job is. They are going to go over the resumes and actually tailor the position *for* you.
My wife is interested in getting a new laptop, as her old one is running XP and starting to be a bit slow for the indented purpose (video editing). They use Windows 7 at work with corporate desktop, and she'd like to have that at home too. Only problem: If I take a look at any laptop available it pretty much comes bundled with Windows 8.
Technically I have "downgrade" rights if the computer comes bundled with Win 8 pro, but I have heard that there are a ton of problems with getting proper drivers and so on (laptop manufacturer might not even provide drivers for Win 7).
Also, I'd still like to wait a bit, since I'm going to upgrade the house's wireless to 802.11ac and laptops are just now starting to arrive with the gigabit wireless bundled. So if it's troublesome getting Win 7 working with new machines right now, I wonder how next-to-impossible it will be by the end of the year.
Try Viva-lite's full spectrum CFLs. (http://www.viva-lite.us/). We have our whole house fitted with them. They come on immediately with full power (apart from the E14-based 11W models, "candle lamp" need a bit of warm-up time), give really nice light especially for working and have a really long life (and 6 month warranty).
Quality-wise, there have been a few occasional bad batches where I have had to call in that warranty, but of all my bulbs that didn't fail in the first 6 months, they ALL have lasted thus far. I got my first ones just for testing like 6 or 7 years ago, and they are still working just fine. Now have about 20+ of such bulbs in the house. They also have fluorescent light tubes (not compact) and full-spectrum LEDs in the product line and they work just as well.
Only drawback: Price. I have paid 20-30 EUR for a bulb, and when you are outfitting your entire apartment it can be a rather big one-time cost. However, like I said, these can last for 10 years...myself, I switched to these one room at a time when the existing bulbs burned out to spread the cost over a longer period.
I don't know about OpenVPN, but for example Cisco Anyconnect is pretty flexible for this kind of stuff. It uses IKEv2+IPSec if possible, then scales down to DTLS, and finally just https (even through proxy if necessary), and as such, can pretty much punch through any firewall. In addition, you get endpoint assessment so you can for example enforce that any updates and such things are installed to the employee's device (whatever that might be).
I have published a paper through Elsevier when I was working on my PhD. At least the contract I signed with them states that I retain the right to distribute the papers if I so choose, for example, on my own website.
Of course, if the distrubution happens through a third party...that might be a different matter.
Xbox should have been a hard lesson that MS management did not know anything about shipping physical units instead of software.
They shipped Sidewinder game controllers before XBox. And they are *still* one of the best available. I still have my Sidewinder Precision Pro, and it's over 10 years old, and still works like a charm.
So they definitely knew their hardware, however, apparently it only applied to the controllers...
They contain error correction, they are scalable, and have quite a nice information density. And you can generate them with tons of free tools and several APIs are available as well.
Personally, I just keep backups and don't bother with hard copies.
I ran into the same problem. Web development is not exactly my typical line of work, but a customer asked for a small project. I couldn't get it (basically a simple webpage that fetches stuff from a database with AJAX) to work with IE no matter what - until I added the meta tags into the HTML:
After these, things started to work with same code that worked with Firefox and Chrome. I haven't bothered since, but most of the issues apparently stemmed from IE wrongly deciding when to go into compatibility mode.
Like someone else commented, the poster uses terms "Copper" and "ISDN" interchangeably. However, with the inclusion of terms like T1/T3, it's clearly about "what can an old telco-guy do in this newfangled IP-based world with 15 years before retirement". Copper here is a misnomer, a lot of stuff can happen over copper (DSLs being the most obvious example).
I have some familiarity in just how dead the technology is. We have a big customer who just placed a big order for Cisco's PVDM digital modems. Why "big", if the tech is dying? Well, that stuff is going to end-of-sale after this summer and they have lot of legacy systems around the globe that dial in (machine-to-machine stuff, and not easily upgradeable everywhere at once). They are moving to IP-based systems but cannot really do that fast enough. Anyway, one of the biggest vendors of network equipment just decided that they aren't going to sell modems that can talk directly to E1/T1 line (analog 2-port models are still in the selection though). I don't know that anyone else is selling such stuff either (Alcatel maybe?). That technology had it's day, but it's long gone.
There might of course be places where, due to signaling constraints, you need to run a E1/T1, but it doesn't really use any of the features. You just run PPP over that link and be done with it - no one cares about the intricasies of Q.931 framing or setting up calls for such links. Even in telephony, it will continue to have some uses, for example many PBX systems still only provide E1/T1 uplink - even if it's going to be used just to connect couple of feet to the SIP gateway right at the next rack.
Frankly, your father has two choices: Either
a) Get entrenched into some niche that really can keep on going with ISDN-based technologies for the next 15 years - you know, maintain job security by being the "only one left who understands this piece of legacy junk that we cannot migrate away from fast". Frankly, I find such positions hard to imagine - sure, maybe if he was retiring in this decade, it could work, but hardly in the 2020's.
or
b) Join the IP world. Frankly, I would think that with a reasonable effort he could still become an expert in VoIP - you still need skills like provisioning (for QoS), codecs (even the G.711a/mu-law is relevant), and so on. Lot of the concepts in SIP are still based on the good old stuff from telco days. You just need to wrap your head around the concept that instead of TDM sending each frame at exactly right intervals, you get packets that might occasionally get lost or routed wrongly or arrive out-of-order...And frankly, you also don't need to care anymore about stuff like SPID's or TEIs. Which I would think of a relief.
On a decent machine Win8 is faster than Win7 for startup/shutdown/restart and basically everything else. On the three machines i've used with SSD, a full restart from desktop to login screen (and desktop again if I factor out time to type in the password) was faster than getting through the bios bootup screen. I don't know what you did to your machine, but you did something...
The workstations in question are actually running on a centralized HyperV server (accessed with thin clients or via RDP). So the hardware is actually *identical* to the previous Win 7 deployment.
We've just been handed out workstations with Windows 8 in them. My productivity has plummeted. Lots of really small things.
Start menu isn't one of them, not really. Classic Shell is available and works most of the time. However, there are lots of small snags, that individually wouldn't matter, but since they are *all* present I'm really avoiding the use of the new WS at all costs.
1) The desktop interface doesn't allow for proper, colored themes. I've been able to patch things somewhat with UXPatcher from http://www.syssel.net/hoefs/software_uxtheme.php?lang=en and an appropriate theme from Deviantart, but I still think it's ugly. I cannot customize colors anymore, the title bar text is ALWAYS black. 2) Title bar text is centered. I know that it's centered on e.g. Mac OSX, but it's not been centered in Windows since Win 3.1. I have lost lots of working hours simply because I've alt-tabbed, and my typical quick glance at the top left of window doesn't give me confirmation that I'm at the correct window causes problems. At least, it takes time for me to move my face to center of each title bar. At worst, it leads to lost work - I've already once started to configure wrong server. 3) Application associations are to Metro apps by default.When clicking a file on the desktop, why the hell does Windows think I want to launch a Metro app? 4) At some point I somehow managed to launch the Finances application. Suddendly my screen is full of stock tickers. I don't know how to close it. Alt+f4 doesn't work. Esc doesn't work. Finally, Win+D seemed to work. I still don't know why that app started. 5) Most of the desktop effects that seemed to work fine in Win7 doesn't work with my RDP client from Linux machine (krdc). Sometimes I can't even see the pointer (taking cursor shadows off seem to help) 6) It's slow. Reboot seems to take like 5 minutes.
I'm not particularly worried though. On the desktop, Windows 7 will stay prevalent for ages.
However, on the server side, Windows Server 2012 has similar problems in it's UI (well, no Metro, but...)
Just create an ad-hoc guest account with limited rights. That way they can't really screw up things. Once the guest has left the premises, remove the account. You don't even have to log out yourself if someone just needs the access for five minutes, just switch users.
A step further: Build a virtual machine with a e.g. your basic Linux distro or Windows XP, create a snapshot of it in it's "fresh" state, and set it up to talk only directly to the Internet without any access to your local network. You can achieve this with Virtualbox at least. Let your guest access the virtual machine. When the guest leaves, just revert it to the snapshot state.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not paying the $40-$50 they want for some of the current games that are seriously outdated graphics and the PC versions are ports that don't get any love at all.
I agree. I just shelled out $65 for Tides of Numenera on Kickstarter, and I earlier put in $30 for Star Citizen. And they are not even going to be ready for quite some time! I didn't put any money, but I think I'll probably end up buying Hero-U (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1878147873/hero-u-rogue-to-redemption) once it's completed. Also interested in Richard Garriot's new project (Shroud of Avatar), not sure if I'm going to participate in the crowdfunding or not.
"Indie" does not necessarily mean "cheap" (see Tides and Star Citizen), of course they have smaller budgets than the triple-As even though Star Citizen is approaching $10M, but for me the recent ones have been about a certain renaissance. It's kinda has same overtures as Baldur's Gate series did 13 years ago - renewing the entire RPG genre, but on a industry-wide scale instead.
And gotta say, I love it. For last 5-7 years I've basically played just WoW and very few other games, until things started gaining more momentum about a year ago. The new indies, combined with Steam holiday discounts (where you can pay $5-$10 for a bit older games) has basically given me gaming back as a hobby.
Not based in North Korea, but a fake. Basically they have hijacked couple of IP addresses and set up fake BGP advertisement, and probably generated an artificial delay with some Linux box to emulate a satellite link. Most likely the 'bay is now hosted from Cambodia.
Teredo(IPv6 over UDP) is easy to set up - if your Windows is Vista or later, it works automatically. For Linux it depends on the distro. If you happen to be in a non-NATted environment for once, 6to4 works great too.
So just enjoy the IPv6.
If you have devices at home that don't support IPv6, you can set up a NAT64 within your home network.
I'm not working for Yahoo (or in the US for that matter), but work from home 3 to 4 days a week on average (office is 170 km away). I have the telecommuting detailed in my contract. If you are a remote worker for Yahoo and the contract stipulates that your place of work is not at the office, can you really be fired with a just cause?
Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.
Offtopic, but I always thought this meme was just something that happened in the movies. Is (American?) plumbing really that bad that when someone else opens a tap or flushes a toilet, you immediately get boiled in a shower? For real?
It's just that I've never encountered this effect anywhere. Sure, sometimes the hot water would be out due to a malfunctioning heater or something, but never had this effect of scalding hot burns right after someone else touches a tap..
There are several comments here stating that the PhD means that hiring managers are scared of those. They are - but only if it's a "pure" PhD. I've got a lots of friends in academia who haven't spent a day in the industry. They are scared witless on what happens if their grant money expires (and are without tenure), since industry is such a different world and hiring managers know that they'd be like fish out of water.
However, you seem to be in a very much similar situation as me. I completed my PhD last year. I happen to also have industry experience, including 9 years of working for an ISP, and a CCIE certificate. From my experience, it's a *very* attractive combination - to an emplyer, it means that you know what's going on in the real world and understand customers, and yet you can also look at the bleeding edge of research and maybe have some insight on how things at the horizon might affect your business in a few years - and maybe capitalize on those opportunities ahead of the curve. I know several people with similar backgrounds - in big companies they are usually located somewhere near CTOs office or similar positions, if not directly in R&D departments, but a few of them (myself included) deal with customers and their networks on a daily basis.
That pause in your resume doesn't really matter *if* you can demonstrate that you haven't been in the ivory tower of universities but can actually deal with real-world problems.
You could run it off PC-DOS disk on a clone machine - and then get an error message about an unimplemented BIOS call. So no, didn't work, part of the code was in ROM.
As someone who has completed all Ultimas from IV to VIII (including Serpent Isle and Ultima Underworlds), that's just nostalgy filter shining.
I don't count "believeable world" to be one where I have to guess keyword, and talk with "Name?", "Job?".
Granted, since U5 the NPCs started to actually have daily routines, but...well, ten years after U7, you had a RPG renaissance that started with Baldur's Gate. Have you tried it (with all the fan-made upgrades for todays computers)?
For more recent stuff, well, Skyrim actually is pretty damn good. I'll grant you that earlier Elder scrolls games (I played even Daggerfall) suffered exactly from that lack of immersion, but Skyrim finally feels good.
Then theres pretty much everything Bioware has made since Baldur days, Dragon Age I + Awakening (Dragon Age II suffers from sequelitis), Mass Effect being the recent entries.
And that doesn't even count all the stuff available from indie developers (Magicka!).
They can call. I don't need to answer. If I see someone from work calling, it's my discretion if I answer. If I'm just goofing off, I might as well answer. If I'm having a moment with family or especially if I'm on vacation, they can call all they want - I'm not responding.
I get paid extra when I'm booked for on-call duty outside of office hours. When that happens, sure, call away.
Might be a rather specific use-case, but since there are so many telecommuters...I work from home, and I have a Cisco/Tandberg videophone (one of their "personal systems") on my desk. Although I'm practically never at the office, having the video there gives me that much more "presence" at the office than just being a voice (or writing off emails). The quality is much better than just having a webcam and a laptop + being a dedicated device, I never have to fight with whatever video conferencing software there might be. And of course, it has much better speakerphone capabilities than my cellphone.
I have been very happy with it for the last 2 years. Recently, there has been a bit of pressure to start using MS Lync - but the truth is, Lync is mostly still used as a corporate messenger and not for calls. Lync 2013 does provide for more standards-based approach - instead of MS's RTVideo codec, they are actually going to use H.264, so maybe that'll change things. Then again, you can get one of those Lync-aware phones from Polycom and keep using a dedicated phone.
Forward error correction - there are different algorithms that are dime a dozen.
The one thing that *does* surprise me is that no such thing is built-in to the link layer of 802.11 spec. Physical layer does whatever it can to garner signal from the noise, but there is no redundant data at higher layers at all.
All this has of course resulted in a gazillion papers on that very topic, hoping to see practical application soon.
Slashdot Mirror
As the others have said, tailor your resume to emphasize that you are jack-of-all-trades.
I'm a CCIE and have a doctorate in computer networks, have authored an RFC, and now approaching 20 years of experience in the field, which supposedly puts me into the camp of network expert.
Expect, in reality, my work in last six months has consisted of e.g.: ...yeah, of course there's been the other bits that I'm supposedly better suited for (firewall experties, some dimensioning for network devices, and so on), but the position is pretty officially jack-of-all-trades.
- Database design, operations and reporting (MSSQL and Mysql)
- AJAX programming (Javascript), and all the intricasies that bunch of different Internet Explorer versions mean in practice
- Suddendly familiarizing myself with using hardware load balancers with Microsoft Lync (well, at least somewhat related to networking...)
- Writing a Python-based software for black-box testing microcontrollers
- Deployment, integration and other support work for an Asterisk-based Contact Center/PBX system
So if you are one, just proudly wear that badge. Of course, it's hard to tailor a resume for buzzword-searching headhunters, but as far as positions are concerned, one of the good signs I've seen for a true "JoaT" job ad is one where there are very few *specific* requirements (only something like "experienced in the field") is listed, and then in the "this counts as an advantage" column they have every acronym under the sun...means they don't really have a specialist position in mind, and might mean that they don't actually know what the job is. They are going to go over the resumes and actually tailor the position *for* you.
My wife is interested in getting a new laptop, as her old one is running XP and starting to be a bit slow for the indented purpose (video editing). They use Windows 7 at work with corporate desktop, and she'd like to have that at home too. Only problem: If I take a look at any laptop available it pretty much comes bundled with Windows 8.
Technically I have "downgrade" rights if the computer comes bundled with Win 8 pro, but I have heard that there are a ton of problems with getting proper drivers and so on (laptop manufacturer might not even provide drivers for Win 7).
Also, I'd still like to wait a bit, since I'm going to upgrade the house's wireless to 802.11ac and laptops are just now starting to arrive with the gigabit wireless bundled. So if it's troublesome getting Win 7 working with new machines right now, I wonder how next-to-impossible it will be by the end of the year.
Try Viva-lite's full spectrum CFLs. (http://www.viva-lite.us/). We have our whole house fitted with them. They come on immediately with full power (apart from the E14-based 11W models, "candle lamp" need a bit of warm-up time), give really nice light especially for working and have a really long life (and 6 month warranty).
Quality-wise, there have been a few occasional bad batches where I have had to call in that warranty, but of all my bulbs that didn't fail in the first 6 months, they ALL have lasted thus far. I got my first ones just for testing like 6 or 7 years ago, and they are still working just fine. Now have about 20+ of such bulbs in the house. They also have fluorescent light tubes (not compact) and full-spectrum LEDs in the product line and they work just as well.
Only drawback: Price. I have paid 20-30 EUR for a bulb, and when you are outfitting your entire apartment it can be a rather big one-time cost. However, like I said, these can last for 10 years...myself, I switched to these one room at a time when the existing bulbs burned out to spread the cost over a longer period.
I don't know about OpenVPN, but for example Cisco Anyconnect is pretty flexible for this kind of stuff. It uses IKEv2+IPSec if possible, then scales down to DTLS, and finally just https (even through proxy if necessary), and as such, can pretty much punch through any firewall. In addition, you get endpoint assessment so you can for example enforce that any updates and such things are installed to the employee's device (whatever that might be).
I have published a paper through Elsevier when I was working on my PhD. At least the contract I signed with them states that I retain the right to distribute the papers if I so choose, for example, on my own website.
Of course, if the distrubution happens through a third party...that might be a different matter.
Xbox should have been a hard lesson that MS management did not know anything about shipping physical units instead of software.
They shipped Sidewinder game controllers before XBox. And they are *still* one of the best available. I still have my Sidewinder Precision Pro, and it's over 10 years old, and still works like a charm.
So they definitely knew their hardware, however, apparently it only applied to the controllers...
They contain error correction, they are scalable, and have quite a nice information density. And you can generate them with tons of free tools and several APIs are available as well.
Personally, I just keep backups and don't bother with hard copies.
No it wasn't, 9/11 held that title for about two months:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587
265 dead (all onboard + 5 on ground), so if anything, this one was even larger.
I ran into the same problem. Web development is not exactly my typical line of work, but a customer asked for a small project. I couldn't get it (basically a simple webpage that fetches stuff from a database with AJAX) to work with IE no matter what - until I added the meta tags into the HTML:
After these, things started to work with same code that worked with Firefox and Chrome. I haven't bothered since, but most of the issues apparently stemmed from IE wrongly deciding when to go into compatibility mode.
Kinda leads to this: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoneyDearBoy
Like someone else commented, the poster uses terms "Copper" and "ISDN" interchangeably. However, with the inclusion of terms like T1/T3, it's clearly about "what can an old telco-guy do in this newfangled IP-based world with 15 years before retirement". Copper here is a misnomer, a lot of stuff can happen over copper (DSLs being the most obvious example).
I have some familiarity in just how dead the technology is. We have a big customer who just placed a big order for Cisco's PVDM digital modems. Why "big", if the tech is dying? Well, that stuff is going to end-of-sale after this summer and they have lot of legacy systems around the globe that dial in (machine-to-machine stuff, and not easily upgradeable everywhere at once). They are moving to IP-based systems but cannot really do that fast enough. Anyway, one of the biggest vendors of network equipment just decided that they aren't going to sell modems that can talk directly to E1/T1 line (analog 2-port models are still in the selection though). I don't know that anyone else is selling such stuff either (Alcatel maybe?). That technology had it's day, but it's long gone.
There might of course be places where, due to signaling constraints, you need to run a E1/T1, but it doesn't really use any of the features. You just run PPP over that link and be done with it - no one cares about the intricasies of Q.931 framing or setting up calls for such links. Even in telephony, it will continue to have some uses, for example many PBX systems still only provide E1/T1 uplink - even if it's going to be used just to connect couple of feet to the SIP gateway right at the next rack.
Frankly, your father has two choices: Either
a) Get entrenched into some niche that really can keep on going with ISDN-based technologies for the next 15 years - you know, maintain job security by being the "only one left who understands this piece of legacy junk that we cannot migrate away from fast". Frankly, I find such positions hard to imagine - sure, maybe if he was retiring in this decade, it could work, but hardly in the 2020's.
or
b) Join the IP world. Frankly, I would think that with a reasonable effort he could still become an expert in VoIP - you still need skills like provisioning (for QoS), codecs (even the G.711a/mu-law is relevant), and so on. Lot of the concepts in SIP are still based on the good old stuff from telco days. You just need to wrap your head around the concept that instead of TDM sending each frame at exactly right intervals, you get packets that might occasionally get lost or routed wrongly or arrive out-of-order...And frankly, you also don't need to care anymore about stuff like SPID's or TEIs. Which I would think of a relief.
On a decent machine Win8 is faster than Win7 for startup/shutdown/restart and basically everything else. On the three machines i've used with SSD, a full restart from desktop to login screen (and desktop again if I factor out time to type in the password) was faster than getting through the bios bootup screen. I don't know what you did to your machine, but you did something...
The workstations in question are actually running on a centralized HyperV server (accessed with thin clients or via RDP). So the hardware is actually *identical* to the previous Win 7 deployment.
We've just been handed out workstations with Windows 8 in them. My productivity has plummeted. Lots of really small things.
Start menu isn't one of them, not really. Classic Shell is available and works most of the time. However, there are lots of small snags, that individually wouldn't matter, but since they are *all* present I'm really avoiding the use of the new WS at all costs.
1) The desktop interface doesn't allow for proper, colored themes. I've been able to patch things somewhat with UXPatcher from http://www.syssel.net/hoefs/software_uxtheme.php?lang=en and an appropriate theme from Deviantart, but I still think it's ugly. I cannot customize colors anymore, the title bar text is ALWAYS black.
2) Title bar text is centered. I know that it's centered on e.g. Mac OSX, but it's not been centered in Windows since Win 3.1. I have lost lots of working hours simply because I've alt-tabbed, and my typical quick glance at the top left of window doesn't give me confirmation that I'm at the correct window causes problems. At least, it takes time for me to move my face to center of each title bar. At worst, it leads to lost work - I've already once started to configure wrong server.
3) Application associations are to Metro apps by default.When clicking a file on the desktop, why the hell does Windows think I want to launch a Metro app?
4) At some point I somehow managed to launch the Finances application. Suddendly my screen is full of stock tickers. I don't know how to close it. Alt+f4 doesn't work. Esc doesn't work. Finally, Win+D seemed to work. I still don't know why that app started.
5) Most of the desktop effects that seemed to work fine in Win7 doesn't work with my RDP client from Linux machine (krdc). Sometimes I can't even see the pointer (taking cursor shadows off seem to help)
6) It's slow. Reboot seems to take like 5 minutes.
I'm not particularly worried though. On the desktop, Windows 7 will stay prevalent for ages.
However, on the server side, Windows Server 2012 has similar problems in it's UI (well, no Metro, but...)
Just create an ad-hoc guest account with limited rights. That way they can't really screw up things. Once the guest has left the premises, remove the account. You don't even have to log out yourself if someone just needs the access for five minutes, just switch users.
A step further: Build a virtual machine with a e.g. your basic Linux distro or Windows XP, create a snapshot of it in it's "fresh" state, and set it up to talk only directly to the Internet without any access to your local network. You can achieve this with Virtualbox at least. Let your guest access the virtual machine. When the guest leaves, just revert it to the snapshot state.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not paying the $40-$50 they want for some of the current games that are seriously outdated graphics and the PC versions are ports that don't get any love at all.
I agree. I just shelled out $65 for Tides of Numenera on Kickstarter, and I earlier put in $30 for Star Citizen. And they are not even going to be ready for quite some time! I didn't put any money, but I think I'll probably end up buying Hero-U (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1878147873/hero-u-rogue-to-redemption) once it's completed. Also interested in Richard Garriot's new project (Shroud of Avatar), not sure if I'm going to participate in the crowdfunding or not.
"Indie" does not necessarily mean "cheap" (see Tides and Star Citizen), of course they have smaller budgets than the triple-As even though Star Citizen is approaching $10M, but for me the recent ones have been about a certain renaissance. It's kinda has same overtures as Baldur's Gate series did 13 years ago - renewing the entire RPG genre, but on a industry-wide scale instead.
And gotta say, I love it. For last 5-7 years I've basically played just WoW and very few other games, until things started gaining more momentum about a year ago. The new indies, combined with Steam holiday discounts (where you can pay $5-$10 for a bit older games) has basically given me gaming back as a hobby.
Not based in North Korea, but a fake. Basically they have hijacked couple of IP addresses and set up fake BGP advertisement, and probably generated an artificial delay with some Linux box to emulate a satellite link. Most likely the 'bay is now hosted from Cambodia.
In-depth analysis here:https://rdns.im/the-pirate-bay-north-korean-hosting-no-its-fake
Teredo(IPv6 over UDP) is easy to set up - if your Windows is Vista or later, it works automatically. For Linux it depends on the distro. If you happen to be in a non-NATted environment for once, 6to4 works great too.
So just enjoy the IPv6.
If you have devices at home that don't support IPv6, you can set up a NAT64 within your home network.
I'm not working for Yahoo (or in the US for that matter), but work from home 3 to 4 days a week on average (office is 170 km away). I have the telecommuting detailed in my contract. If you are a remote worker for Yahoo and the contract stipulates that your place of work is not at the office, can you really be fired with a just cause?
Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.
Offtopic, but I always thought this meme was just something that happened in the movies. Is (American?) plumbing really that bad that when someone else opens a tap or flushes a toilet, you immediately get boiled in a shower? For real?
It's just that I've never encountered this effect anywhere. Sure, sometimes the hot water would be out due to a malfunctioning heater or something, but never had this effect of scalding hot burns right after someone else touches a tap..
There are several comments here stating that the PhD means that hiring managers are scared of those. They are - but only if it's a "pure" PhD. I've got a lots of friends in academia who haven't spent a day in the industry. They are scared witless on what happens if their grant money expires (and are without tenure), since industry is such a different world and hiring managers know that they'd be like fish out of water.
However, you seem to be in a very much similar situation as me. I completed my PhD last year. I happen to also have industry experience, including 9 years of working for an ISP, and a CCIE certificate. From my experience, it's a *very* attractive combination - to an emplyer, it means that you know what's going on in the real world and understand customers, and yet you can also look at the bleeding edge of research and maybe have some insight on how things at the horizon might affect your business in a few years - and maybe capitalize on those opportunities ahead of the curve. I know several people with similar backgrounds - in big companies they are usually located somewhere near CTOs office or similar positions, if not directly in R&D departments, but a few of them (myself included) deal with customers and their networks on a daily basis.
That pause in your resume doesn't really matter *if* you can demonstrate that you haven't been in the ivory tower of universities but can actually deal with real-world problems.
You could run it off PC-DOS disk on a clone machine - and then get an error message about an unimplemented BIOS call. So no, didn't work, part of the code was in ROM.
As someone who has completed all Ultimas from IV to VIII (including Serpent Isle and Ultima Underworlds), that's just nostalgy filter shining.
I don't count "believeable world" to be one where I have to guess keyword, and talk with "Name?", "Job?".
Granted, since U5 the NPCs started to actually have daily routines, but...well, ten years after U7, you had a RPG renaissance that started with Baldur's Gate. Have you tried it (with all the fan-made upgrades for todays computers)?
For more recent stuff, well, Skyrim actually is pretty damn good. I'll grant you that earlier Elder scrolls games (I played even Daggerfall) suffered exactly from that lack of immersion, but Skyrim finally feels good.
Then theres pretty much everything Bioware has made since Baldur days, Dragon Age I + Awakening (Dragon Age II suffers from sequelitis), Mass Effect being the recent entries.
And that doesn't even count all the stuff available from indie developers (Magicka!).
They can call. I don't need to answer. If I see someone from work calling, it's my discretion if I answer. If I'm just goofing off, I might as well answer. If I'm having a moment with family or especially if I'm on vacation, they can call all they want - I'm not responding.
I get paid extra when I'm booked for on-call duty outside of office hours. When that happens, sure, call away.
Might be a rather specific use-case, but since there are so many telecommuters...I work from home, and I have a Cisco/Tandberg videophone (one of their "personal systems") on my desk. Although I'm practically never at the office, having the video there gives me that much more "presence" at the office than just being a voice (or writing off emails). The quality is much better than just having a webcam and a laptop + being a dedicated device, I never have to fight with whatever video conferencing software there might be. And of course, it has much better speakerphone capabilities than my cellphone.
I have been very happy with it for the last 2 years. Recently, there has been a bit of pressure to start using MS Lync - but the truth is, Lync is mostly still used as a corporate messenger and not for calls. Lync 2013 does provide for more standards-based approach - instead of MS's RTVideo codec, they are actually going to use H.264, so maybe that'll change things. Then again, you can get one of those Lync-aware phones from Polycom and keep using a dedicated phone.
Forward error correction - there are different algorithms that are dime a dozen.
The one thing that *does* surprise me is that no such thing is built-in to the link layer of 802.11 spec. Physical layer does whatever it can to garner signal from the noise, but there is no redundant data at higher layers at all.
All this has of course resulted in a gazillion papers on that very topic, hoping to see practical application soon.