When I used to work for a university (mid-1990s), our department's sysdmin had gotten in trouble at the engineering school because he had written a script that would log into every machine multiple times until all ttys were exhausted... so he could run his ray-tracing jobs undisturbed. I heard he got away with it for quite some time before one of their sysadmins came in early and realized something wasn't right.
They told him not to do it, but instead of banning him, they put him to work... he wrote some pretty impressive software to make it easier for us to manage users, and a menu system for the non-technical users (a gopher-like interface that'd run elm / pine / news / lynx / gopher / etc.)
I have an ex-roommate who does refrigeration repair... the pay's okay, but the hours can really, really suck.
He's on-call every couple of weeks, and might have to drive an hour away to fix a chiller at a grocery store; if they can't get to it and get it repaired before it warms up too much, they might have to destroy thousands of dollars worth of food. (and if you to go and get parts, you're kinda screwed) I don't think it's quite as bad as the 'always on duty' as some sysadmins get stuck with, but it can be much more stressful than you'd expect.
I also don't know if it's quite as steady work, even with the 'can't be shipped overseas' argument; my understanding is that with the slowdown of new home construction, there's an oversupply of pipefitters, so companies aren't necessarily hiring. (this might vary by city).
The guy who runs the website works for NASA, but I'm fairly certain that it's a side project, and not a NASA-funded website. (if it was, they'd have NASA logos on it, and not ads)
Solar Monitor used to be hosted by NASA, but it's currently at Trinity College, Dublin.
NASA funded projects would include Helioviewer (also ESA funded) and ISWA
However... there was something a couple of years back and now NASA's not allowed to provide space weather predictions to the public... so you have to get forecast information from NOAA's SWPC
At the DSB meeting on 28 January 2013, Antigua and Barbuda requested the DSB to authorize the suspension of concessions and obligations to the United States in respect of intellectual property rights. Pursuant to the request by Antigua and Barbuda under Article 22.7 of the DSU, the DSB agreed to grant authorization to suspend the application to the United States of concessions or other obligations consistent with the Decision by the Arbitrator.
The one they set up at my work had a 'what are you doing?' question, but it wasn't searchable... so if you wanted to try to find people who might be working or have expertise in a given field... you got nothing.
It likely doesn't matter anyway -- due to how tasks are broken down, it's not like everyone wanted to advertise their skills. I've got a lot of experience that I don't list on my CV, as then I get people asking me about how to fix things all the time. As I'm a contractor, that puts me into awkward positions where if I help people from other projects, I can't charge time to their tasks... but the company I work for requires me to track & bill every hour. The prime on our contract had suggested the it / sysadmin have a mentoring system, but to the best of my knowledge, they've never worked out how we'd change our time for it as we're divided up across 200+ tasks.
I completely agree. The problem with a bunch of tablets is that everyone's off looking at different things. With a whiteboard, you can much more easily tell who's paying attention to the discussion vs. reading their e-mail.
You want to be able to save what was discussed? Bring a camera. The important thing is to take the picture without a flash from a stable location. You might have to experiment with where to take the picture from, so you don't get too much glare from the lighting in the room.
Sometimes you need to show something that you don't want to draw yourself -- that's where the projector comes in. Although whiteboards don't make the best projection surfaces (due to glare issues), you can then mark 'em up w/ the pens, then take a picture so you have notes for later.
If you need to *also* take a set of more permanent notes while you're working, either get a large pad of paper that you can keep to the side of the board. (I like the ones that are also giant Post-It notes) or a second projector w/ someone typing up notes as you go.
I'm not a fan of 'smart whiteboards' as I've heard nothing but bad things about them. I've probably been to more than a dozen conference rooms, and when I mention the one sitting against a wall, I'm told it's either broken, or a pain to use. (the one exception was an elementary school, which we only used it as a projector). The only advantage that I'm aware of is for when you're having a meeting that has participants in multiple places -- which I've never had to deal with.
Government contracting -- we got a bump in our funding for the year, but due to sequestration we knew we wouldn't have it permanently... so we were actually honest in the job advertisement, rather than sucker someone in and cut them at the end of the fiscal year.
I got some interest from people who were willing to work remotely, but the manager (contractor) that was heading up the hiring wanted it to be a W2 position and not a 1099, which I assume is why I never got any of those resumes to review.
Most of the people who know Perl well already have jobs, and aren't looking to change.
We tried hiring someone to help me offload some of my work, and one the task I've gotten behind on is updating & maintaining some Perl code.
We had one person who I felt could've jumped in, but that management didn't like (as he had previously worked here, and left). The rest were folks who we'd have to train on OO, closures, and other higher level concepts.
If this hasn't been offered as a 12-month position, maybe we could've found someone. If we had advertised it as a general programming job, and then taught someone Perl, maybe it would've been gone better for us.
With trendy languages, you at least get people willing to apply -- even if it's the case that they don't grok the language, you at least get someone you can train up.
I found instructions on how to get a transcript from the automatic closed captioning of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, the instructions are in a YouTube video:
Of course, I have no idea what they're using for the video hosting -- I just see 'Missing Plug-in'. The 'alternate link' tells me that I have to install Flash... like hell I will.
Unfortunately, they're only focusing on lettuce for right now.
Personally, I just use a hydroponics system, so I don't have to worry about significant weed problems. (algae and insect problems, yes, but not weeds).
If you want to complain, you'll have to find some that you can actually blame on him... luckily, you have lots to choose from : http://www.politifact.com/trut...
(and this is why when I ran for office, I only made one promise -- that I'd give fair consideration to everything put before me... which meant I once had to abstain from a vote when I found that some complaints had been withheld, as I couldn't research if they were legitimate complaints or not)
That seems to make more sense to me than a 'solar powered bench' which looks to me to be two seats as the whole middle of it's taken up by a box. (which might be the point -- it'd be less comfortable for a homeless person to sleep on it)
I've seen other solar "urban furniture" that made more sense to me -- things like bus stops w/ solar panels in the roof (to power lighting, up-to-date bus info... and sometimes advertising).
I've seen other 'solar phone charging stations' that make more sense to me than having it take up 1/4 of a bench:
Yes, they exist, but the big problem is that you don't know about it 'til the first time you try to fly... and then you have to jump through major hoops (if you're even allowed to board).
The first clue is that the airlines won't let you check in online -- if that happens, make sure you give yourself a couple of hours at the airport, rather than thinking you'll just breeze through security.
Then you can go through explaining that no, the 3 year old you're traveling with is not whoever it is that they're watching. (oh, you laugh, but it happened to my neighbors)
So a few years ago, a bunch of people decided that there was no point in waiting for Perl6, and started back porting the features they liked into Perl5.
And to deal with the whole issue of the Perl6 syntax not being compatible w/ Perl5, they've added 'use feature' where you can tell it which features to enable. (or specify a version number to turn on a whole bunch of things)
So, you want postfix dereferencing? Then use perl 5.20, and enable the feature. (although, I believe it's currently enabled via 'experimental', so people know they're enabling a feature that may change)
Bah. You're assuming that money is the same as speech.
Money is an amplifier for a given person's speech, so a given person can buy a bullhorn & hang out down at the street corner, or by ads on hundreds of TV channels.
So what we have instead of 'limiting' the speech of others is the ability for those with the most money to be able to drown out all other voices until only theirs is heard. This is the equivalent of 'we don't want to put up with that guy with the bullhorn on the street corner'. Everyone should be able to have a voice, not just those that can shout the loudest.
I admit, much of the 'campaign finance reform' laws that they've attempted to pass have been flawed... but trying to argue that money is a form of speech is horrible, horrible logic -- it's right up there with 'corporations are people', and claiming that corporations should have rights under the constitution.
And on the "money out of politics" front, some of the people who had been part of 'Occupy' have started 99 Rise, which their website describes as 'a network of activists and organizers dedicated to building a mass movement to reclaim our democracy from the domination of big money'.
My girlfriend in high school and I would frequently go into the dark room -- but you really didn't have much time, as the teacher knew how much time things should take, and would wonder why we were going in there if it wasn't to develop something. (we had a print shop, and one of the darkrooms had a vertical process camera, so we were in there quite often; the photography darkroom not so much)
If you over developed things, he'd know you weren't watching things closely. So you could sneak a minute or two of snogging in, but that's about it.
We had darkrooms where the door revolveds, so there wasn't any way to let light from the outside into the darkroom. You learned to keep the door towards the inside, so you had a couple seconds of warning.
As someone who manages a PEG channel -- I agree, the fees can be excessive, and they're just passed right through to the consumer, so it's effectively just a tax on those who buy fixed line video services.
However, they should be equal across all providers, so to not hit them all with it equally means that you're favoring one over another, and as these agreements typically span 10-15 years, odds are there's one out there that has it.
As for the free service -- our town doesn't force them to connect up any non-profits, only government buildings. It's possible that other towns do that, but again, this would just mean that you're favoring a given group over another. I'd much prefer to see free (even if low speed) wifi covering our downtown area than picking and choosing which non-profits get special access.
In larger libraries, there's often someone with the title of 'systems librarian. It might be the person who just configures the software packages that the library uses, but it's often someone with a bit of IT skills.
It might be an IT person who slowly picks up the librarian issues (and some will go and get a library degree if at an academic library), or it's a library person with a bit of IT skills.
If you're one of these people, and aren't already on the code4lib mailing list, I highly recommend it. (although be warned, occassionally threads get out of control).
You can also check the code4lib jobs board for what sort of skills libraries are looking for.
I currently work in IT attached to a science data archive.
Much of the software is written by the scientists themselves, who really should not be writing production code. (Sure, the scientists should spec it out... but have someone who understands security & maintainability write the code... so doesn't write C that generates Perl that then calls shell commands... and wraps the whole thing in a csh script to run as a CGI)
I once saw this issue mitigated by keeping a cell that had the count of the non-number cells in the sum. If it wasn't zero, the cell was turned red, so you could easily see something was wrong.
They had a region of the spreadsheet dedicated to checks, which would all be colored either green or red, so you could easily glance at it and see if there were issues with the data entry.
... the important part is to pick the metric that you like:
First, we have our possible definitions of 'family farm' :
1. Farms operated by indvidual families 2. Farms owned by individual families 3. Farms owned or operated by individual families that produce agricultural products for sale 4. Farms owned or operated by individual families that aren't incorporated. (might be a death tax dodge, might be a huge corporatation that's tightly held) 5. Farms owned an operated by individual families that qualify as a 'small business'. 6. Farms under a given acerage.
And we can further modify what we're analyzing:
a....only those farms that produce agricultural products for sale. b....only those farms that produce food. c....only those farms that produce food intended for human consumption. (no sod or flower farms, feedstock for biodiesel) d....only those farms that produce food that contributes to the human food chain. (so allow hay, alfalfa and animal feed if grown for cows, but if the cows are to be dog food). e....only those farms that 'contribute meaningfully to the market'.
Then, we have our metric, selecting the definiton of 'family farm' that's most advantageous of what we're trying to show, comparing "family farms" to either "corporate farms" or to "all farms":
1. Percentage of the count "family farms" 2. Percentage of the acerage of "family farms" 3. Percentage of the acerage used for farming in a given year. 4. Percentage of the products produced by "family farms" (in tons) 5. Percentage of the products produced by "family farms" (in dollars) 6&7. Percentage of the food produced by "family farms" (tons / dollars) 8&9. Percentage of the food sold by "family farms" (tons/dollars)
Some of these, I'm not even sure which way the selection bias will be. (family farms might sell at farmer's markets and get a better price per pound... or they might focus on herbs and things typically sold at higher margins that don't tend to be grown on a massive scale).
But like anything, you run all of the different combinations, and pick the one that gives you the answer to support whatever argument you're trying to make.
... because gaming just isn't fun until you've managed to get the guy in the next cubicle to have a vertigo attack.
(the problem was, he got over it after a while, and would come back to really crush everyone in our office)
But watching someone play would set most people off, so it wasn't safe to play during lunch (when people might walk by and see your screen); we'd have to wait 'til after hours.
Slashdot Mirror
When I used to work for a university (mid-1990s), our department's sysdmin had gotten in trouble at the engineering school because he had written a script that would log into every machine multiple times until all ttys were exhausted ... so he could run his ray-tracing jobs undisturbed. I heard he got away with it for quite some time before one of their sysadmins came in early and realized something wasn't right.
They told him not to do it, but instead of banning him, they put him to work ... he wrote some pretty impressive software to make it easier for us to manage users, and a menu system for the non-technical users (a gopher-like interface that'd run elm / pine / news / lynx / gopher / etc.)
I have an ex-roommate who does refrigeration repair ... the pay's okay, but the hours can really, really suck.
He's on-call every couple of weeks, and might have to drive an hour away to fix a chiller at a grocery store; if they can't get to it and get it repaired before it warms up too much, they might have to destroy thousands of dollars worth of food. (and if you to go and get parts, you're kinda screwed) I don't think it's quite as bad as the 'always on duty' as some sysadmins get stuck with, but it can be much more stressful than you'd expect.
I also don't know if it's quite as steady work, even with the 'can't be shipped overseas' argument; my
understanding is that with the slowdown of new home construction, there's an oversupply of pipefitters, so companies aren't necessarily hiring. (this might vary by city).
And rather than just try for first post ... here are the articles in question:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
The guy who runs the website works for NASA, but I'm fairly certain that it's a side project, and not a NASA-funded website. (if it was, they'd have NASA logos on it, and not ads)
Solar Monitor used to be hosted by NASA, but it's currently at Trinity College, Dublin.
NASA funded projects would include Helioviewer (also ESA funded) and ISWA
However ... there was something a couple of years back and now NASA's not allowed to provide space weather predictions to the public ... so you have to get forecast information from NOAA's SWPC
The WTO (World Trade Organization) gave them an exemption from complying with US copyright laws, due to a 10+ year dispute over online gambling:
http://www.wto.org/english/tra...
The one they set up at my work had a 'what are you doing?' question, but it wasn't searchable... so if you wanted to try to find people who might be working or have expertise in a given field ... you got nothing.
It likely doesn't matter anyway -- due to how tasks are broken down, it's not like everyone wanted to advertise their skills. I've got a lot of experience that I don't list on my CV, as then I get people asking me about how to fix things all the time. As I'm a contractor, that puts me into awkward positions where if I help people from other projects, I can't charge time to their tasks ... but the company I work for requires me to track & bill every hour. The prime on our contract had suggested the it / sysadmin have a mentoring system, but to the best of my knowledge, they've never worked out how we'd change our time for it as we're divided up across 200+ tasks.
I completely agree. The problem with a bunch of tablets is that everyone's off looking at different things. With a whiteboard, you can much more easily tell who's paying attention to the discussion vs. reading their e-mail.
You want to be able to save what was discussed? Bring a camera. The important thing is to take the picture without a flash from a stable location. You might have to experiment with where to take the picture from, so you don't get too much glare from the lighting in the room.
Sometimes you need to show something that you don't want to draw yourself -- that's where the projector comes in. Although whiteboards don't make the best projection surfaces (due to glare issues), you can then mark 'em up w/ the pens, then take a picture so you have notes for later.
If you need to *also* take a set of more permanent notes while you're working, either get a large pad of paper that you can keep to the side of the board. (I like the ones that are also giant Post-It notes) or a second projector w/ someone typing up notes as you go.
I'm not a fan of 'smart whiteboards' as I've heard nothing but bad things about them. I've probably been to more than a dozen conference rooms, and when I mention the one sitting against a wall, I'm told it's either broken, or a pain to use. (the one exception was an elementary school, which we only used it as a projector). The only advantage that I'm aware of is for when you're having a meeting that has participants in multiple places -- which I've never had to deal with.
Government contracting -- we got a bump in our funding for the year, but due to sequestration we knew we wouldn't have it permanently ... so we were actually honest in the job advertisement, rather than sucker someone in and cut them at the end of the fiscal year.
I got some interest from people who were willing to work remotely, but the manager (contractor) that was heading up the hiring wanted it to be a W2 position and not a 1099, which I assume is why I never got any of those resumes to review.
Most of the people who know Perl well already have jobs, and aren't looking to change.
We tried hiring someone to help me offload some of my work, and one the task I've gotten behind on is updating & maintaining some Perl code.
We had one person who I felt could've jumped in, but that management didn't like (as he had previously worked here, and left). The rest were folks who we'd have to train on OO, closures, and other higher level concepts.
If this hasn't been offered as a 12-month position, maybe we could've found someone. If we had advertised it as a general programming job, and then taught someone Perl, maybe it would've been gone better for us.
With trendy languages, you at least get people willing to apply -- even if it's the case that they don't grok the language, you at least get someone you can train up.
I found instructions on how to get a transcript from the automatic closed captioning of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, the instructions are in a YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Of course, I have no idea what they're using for the video hosting -- I just see 'Missing Plug-in'. The 'alternate link' tells me that I have to install Flash ... like hell I will.
http://modernfarmer.com/2013/0...
Unfortunately, they're only focusing on lettuce for right now.
Personally, I just use a hydroponics system, so I don't have to worry about significant weed problems. (algae and insect problems, yes, but not weeds).
I don't think you can blame him for Guantanamo -- he's been blocked by Congress on that one: http://www.politifact.com/trut...
If you want to complain, you'll have to find some that you can actually blame on him ... luckily, you have lots to choose from : http://www.politifact.com/trut...
(and this is why when I ran for office, I only made one promise -- that I'd give fair consideration to everything put before me ... which meant I once had to abstain from a vote when I found that some complaints had been withheld, as I couldn't research if they were legitimate complaints or not)
Okay, technically, they're trash compactors, so that they don't have to go and empty them as often:
http://www.cityofboston.gov/pu...
That seems to make more sense to me than a 'solar powered bench' which looks to me to be two seats as the whole middle of it's taken up by a box. (which might be the point -- it'd be less comfortable for a homeless person to sleep on it)
I've seen other solar "urban furniture" that made more sense to me -- things like bus stops w/ solar panels in the roof (to power lighting, up-to-date bus info ... and sometimes advertising).
I've seen other 'solar phone charging stations' that make more sense to me than having it take up 1/4 of a bench:
http://inhabitat.com/nyc/solar...
http://www.gizmag.com/street-c...
http://bostinno.streetwise.co/...
Yes, they exist, but the big problem is that you don't know about it 'til the first time you try to fly ... and then you have to jump through major hoops (if you're even allowed to board).
The first clue is that the airlines won't let you check in online -- if that happens, make sure you give yourself a couple of hours at the airport, rather than thinking you'll just breeze through security.
Then you can go through explaining that no, the 3 year old you're traveling with is not whoever it is that they're watching. (oh, you laugh, but it happened to my neighbors)
So a few years ago, a bunch of people decided that there was no point in waiting for Perl6, and started back porting the features they liked into Perl5.
And to deal with the whole issue of the Perl6 syntax not being compatible w/ Perl5, they've added 'use feature' where you can tell it which features to enable. (or specify a version number to turn on a whole bunch of things)
So, you want postfix dereferencing? Then use perl 5.20, and enable the feature. (although, I believe it's currently enabled via 'experimental', so people know they're enabling a feature that may change)
Bah. You're assuming that money is the same as speech.
Money is an amplifier for a given person's speech, so a given person can buy a bullhorn & hang out down at the street corner, or by ads on hundreds of TV channels.
So what we have instead of 'limiting' the speech of others is the ability for those with the most money to be able to drown out all other voices until only theirs is heard. This is the equivalent of 'we don't want to put up with that guy with the bullhorn on the street corner'. Everyone should be able to have a voice, not just those that can shout the loudest.
I admit, much of the 'campaign finance reform' laws that they've attempted to pass have been flawed ... but trying to argue that money is a form of speech is horrible, horrible logic -- it's right up there with 'corporations are people', and claiming that corporations should have rights under the constitution.
And on the "money out of politics" front, some of the people who had been part of 'Occupy' have started 99 Rise, which their website describes as 'a network of activists and organizers dedicated to building a mass movement to reclaim our democracy from the domination of big money'.
My girlfriend in high school and I would frequently go into the dark room -- but you really didn't have much time, as the teacher knew how much time things should take, and would wonder why we were going in there if it wasn't to develop something. (we had a print shop, and one of the darkrooms had a vertical process camera, so we were in there quite often; the photography darkroom not so much)
If you over developed things, he'd know you weren't watching things closely. So you could sneak a minute or two of snogging in, but that's about it.
We had darkrooms where the door revolveds, so there wasn't any way to let light from the outside into the darkroom. You learned to keep the door towards the inside, so you had a couple seconds of warning.
n/t
As someone who manages a PEG channel -- I agree, the fees can be excessive, and they're just passed right through to the consumer, so it's effectively just a tax on those who buy fixed line video services.
However, they should be equal across all providers, so to not hit them all with it equally means that you're favoring one over another, and as these agreements typically span 10-15 years, odds are there's one out there that has it.
As for the free service -- our town doesn't force them to connect up any non-profits, only government buildings. It's possible that other towns do that, but again, this would just mean that you're favoring a given group over another. I'd much prefer to see free (even if low speed) wifi covering our downtown area than picking and choosing which non-profits get special access.
In larger libraries, there's often someone with the title of 'systems librarian. It might be the person who just configures the software packages that the library uses, but it's often someone with a bit of IT skills.
It might be an IT person who slowly picks up the librarian issues (and some will go and get a library degree if at an academic library), or it's a library person with a bit of IT skills.
If you're one of these people, and aren't already on the code4lib mailing list, I highly recommend it. (although be warned, occassionally threads get out of control).
You can also check the code4lib jobs board for what sort of skills libraries are looking for.
I know it sounds strange, but there are a lot of skills that overlap:
I wouldn't recommend it as a career, though. I did 6 months as a town commissioner (while working full time) before I needed to take some time off.
I currently work in IT attached to a science data archive.
Much of the software is written by the scientists themselves, who really should not be writing production code. (Sure, the scientists should spec it out ... but have someone who understands security & maintainability write the code ... so doesn't write C that generates Perl that then calls shell commands ... and wraps the whole thing in a csh script to run as a CGI)
I once saw this issue mitigated by keeping a cell that had the count of the non-number cells in the sum. If it wasn't zero, the cell was turned red, so you could easily see something was wrong.
They had a region of the spreadsheet dedicated to checks, which would all be colored either green or red, so you could easily glance at it and see if there were issues with the data entry.
... the important part is to pick the metric that you like:
First, we have our possible definitions of 'family farm' :
1. Farms operated by indvidual families
2. Farms owned by individual families
3. Farms owned or operated by individual families that produce agricultural products for sale
4. Farms owned or operated by individual families that aren't incorporated. (might be a death tax dodge, might be a huge corporatation that's tightly held)
5. Farms owned an operated by individual families that qualify as a 'small business'.
6. Farms under a given acerage.
And we can further modify what we're analyzing:
a. ...only those farms that produce agricultural products for sale. ...only those farms that produce food. ...only those farms that produce food intended for human consumption. (no sod or flower farms, feedstock for biodiesel) ...only those farms that produce food that contributes to the human food chain. (so allow hay, alfalfa and animal feed if grown for cows, but if the cows are to be dog food). ...only those farms that 'contribute meaningfully to the market'.
b.
c.
d.
e.
Then, we have our metric, selecting the definiton of 'family farm' that's most advantageous of what we're trying to show, comparing "family farms" to either "corporate farms" or to "all farms":
1. Percentage of the count "family farms"
2. Percentage of the acerage of "family farms" 3. Percentage of the acerage used for farming in a given year.
4. Percentage of the products produced by "family farms" (in tons)
5. Percentage of the products produced by "family farms" (in dollars)
6&7. Percentage of the food produced by "family farms" (tons / dollars)
8&9. Percentage of the food sold by "family farms" (tons/dollars)
Some of these, I'm not even sure which way the selection bias will be. (family farms might sell at farmer's markets and get a better price per pound ... or they might focus on herbs and things typically sold at higher margins that don't tend to be grown on a massive scale).
But like anything, you run all of the different combinations, and pick the one that gives you the answer to support whatever argument you're trying to make.
... because gaming just isn't fun until you've managed to get the guy in the next cubicle to have a vertigo attack.
(the problem was, he got over it after a while, and would come back to really crush everyone in our office)
But watching someone play would set most people off, so it wasn't safe to play during lunch (when people might walk by and see your screen); we'd have to wait 'til after hours.