But the newer processors, 800MHz and faster, are what I'm talking about. Modern systems are I/O bound, and likely to remain that way. Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?
Well, if you're factoring large primes it is, but for 99.99% of us it's a non-issue. After all, when was the last time you heard someone talk about spreadsheet recalculation times?
My father was in DoD for years doing R&D work. He retired in 89 and every once in a while some Cool New Thing comes out and he says "Oh yeah, I remember working on that 20 years ago."
I've seen companies, market leaders even( *cough* seagate *cough*), that had incredible bureaucracy. Have to go through five layers of it to get a $50 expenditure approved.
IMC. We don't do anything with you guys, but we do a bit with GRCI. Most of our stuff is for DMSO, but BMDO may give us some business.
Last Sept was freaky here. It seemed that everyone knew people in the Pentagon, WTC, or both. Having to ask the question "Is our customer still alive?" is a bit unnerving.
The fastest way would be to enlist in the military. As a college grad, assuming you have no drug busts, you would be an officer. All the services need technical people. After 6 years active duty you would have three things that an employer would look for:
Leadership experience
Technical experience
Security clearance
<GINSU>But wait, there's more!</GINSU>
You would also get the GI Bill, which will pay for grad school. Have a student loan? The military will pay it off for you. VA Loan when you want to buy a house.
And 6 years isn't that long, if you think about it. Not out of a career that's likely to span 40 years or more.
For techies, anyway. The Federal Government has a severe shortage of techies and something like 50% of the workforce is going to retire in the next ten years. USGS has long been in the forefront of technology, in its field, NASA does pretty well. DoD understands the importance of technology, and pursues it avidly. Ever heard of Darpa? NSA tries to stay five years ahead of the civilian state of the art.
Of course, you have to avoid drugs, and the best jobs require a security clearance.
As was pointed out in the article, many contractors will hire someone with a clearance and no experience because training them takes less time than clearing them does. A top secret clearance is a real meal ticket. The cultural differences are interesting. The government contractor expects to provide support for a product for years where the dot-com guy expects the product to be completely gone in less than a year. The government contractor wants coding standards and lots of documentation, so that if the programmer gets run over by a bus someone else can step in. The dot-com guy doesn't have the time, or inclination, to do documentaton, and often feels that coding standards are an infringement on his creativity. The contractor expects to stick with the same company, often the same project, for years. The dot-com guy expects to go from place to place following the money or the latest new exciting thing.
I work for a DoD contractor, and there's a war on. Woo! hoo! I'm gonna buy a house!
Tidal stresses, such as the ones that drive the volcanos on Io, may produce enough heat to produce liquid water under the surface of Europa. And all you need is heat, hydrogen, and CO2 to have life.
industry standard boilerplate
on
Borland Backs Down
·
· Score: 4, Offtopic
That's the problem. Everyone has licenses like that. It's "industry standard boilerplate". Oh well, as long as we continue to pay close attention we can force some companies to be reasonable. Others, however, are not so susceptible to pressure.
Rational Rose generates tons of UML diagrams. The way we handle it is to write out our documentation in a text editor, and send it to the Rational guy, who puts it in the model. Then we show the pretty diagrams to the customer.
UML is designed to allow programmers, engineers, and managers to share design information in an object oriented way, and is visual. Think of it as an object oriented flowchart.
XML is designed to allow systems to share data, and is textual.
It's not better. From a reliability point of view it may be worse. But we are talking legal liability here. If Windows barfs and eats $50,000 worth of data I can sue Microsoft. If the Linux kernel does that I can sue. Ummmm. Linus Torvalds. See the problem OSS faces here?
The 4 prong plug is what was used before the rj-45(I think...) came out. You can get converters at Radio Shack to allow that type of plug to work in a modern system.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant "find prime factors". And I was a math major, too. Hope Prof. Heath isn't reading this thread.
Correction, I think possesion of some of the comsec and other high end top secret clearances is classified.
But the newer processors, 800MHz and faster, are what I'm talking about. Modern systems are I/O bound, and likely to remain that way. Do I care if it takes 29 seconds to recompile vs 30 seconds?
It usually takes over a year to get a secret clearance.
Well, if you're factoring large primes it is, but for 99.99% of us it's a non-issue. After all, when was the last time you heard someone talk about spreadsheet recalculation times?
I've seen companies, market leaders even( *cough* seagate *cough*), that had incredible bureaucracy. Have to go through five layers of it to get a $50 expenditure approved.
Last Sept was freaky here. It seemed that everyone knew people in the Pentagon, WTC, or both. Having to ask the question "Is our customer still alive?" is a bit unnerving.
<GINSU>But wait, there's more!</GINSU>
You would also get the GI Bill, which will pay for grad school. Have a student loan? The military will pay it off for you. VA Loan when you want to buy a house.
And 6 years isn't that long, if you think about it. Not out of a career that's likely to span 40 years or more.
Of course, you have to avoid drugs, and the best jobs require a security clearance.
I work for a DoD contractor, and there's a war on. Woo! hoo! I'm gonna buy a house!
When life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.
Summary
What if Linus got hauled into court after ext2fs ate someone's data?
I'm gonna put that one in my miscellaneous cool quotes file.
Tidal stresses, such as the ones that drive the volcanos on Io, may produce enough heat to produce liquid water under the surface of Europa. And all you need is heat, hydrogen, and CO2 to have life.
That's the problem. Everyone has licenses like that. It's "industry standard boilerplate". Oh well, as long as we continue to pay close attention we can force some companies to be reasonable. Others, however, are not so susceptible to pressure.
NASA landed NEAR on Eros
We can strip mine the rest later...
See Cringely's piece on how Jobs defines 'winning'. It's not how Katz defines it.
Rational Rose generates tons of UML diagrams. The way we handle it is to write out our documentation in a text editor, and send it to the Rational guy, who puts it in the model. Then we show the pretty diagrams to the customer.
The O'Reilly UML Book is out of print, but fairly good.
XML is designed to allow systems to share data, and is textual.
Had an op-ed a few days ago in the Post about this.
It's not better. From a reliability point of view it may be worse. But we are talking legal liability here. If Windows barfs and eats $50,000 worth of data I can sue Microsoft. If the Linux kernel does that I can sue. Ummmm. Linus Torvalds. See the problem OSS faces here?
The robots probably live longer...
The 4 prong plug is what was used before the rj-45(I think...) came out. You can get converters at Radio Shack to allow that type of plug to work in a modern system.