Well, the St. Stephens Green Shopping Centre will be packed solid with shoppers at noon on a sunny Saturday. That will make it difficult just to get around, and the hunters will probably annoy a lot of people. It's a pretty lame spot, just three levels around a central open space. Not too many spots for a fox to hide or move around easily.
I hope the weather reports are correct for Dublin, sunshine and 10 degrees for Saturday. The continent has been fucking c*ld this week, the snow hasn't melted since the storm a week ago. But Dublin seems to have escaped the worst of this last siberean blast.
The park should be a good place for a hunt. Lots of curving trails, open spaces, and hidden areas. If the fox is wearing a large parka and has the kit stowed under the jacket, there isn't going to be any good way to just spot them.
The most fun part will be running around in the Temple Bar area. Teams will have to search every bar carefully, long enough to sample the Guinness. After confirming the fox is not in any of 8 or 9 bars, teams will not really feel the urgency to return to the hunt, and a good time will be had by all;-)
Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?
Yes, which is what these systems will be using. Fraunhofer-gessellschaft (of MP3 encoder fame) is the technology behind these projectors. The stream is encrypted the entire length of the data path until it hits the electronics driving the LCD screen. Each server has a key built in, supposedly impossible to recover without destroying the system. Each film to be distributed is encrypted with both a master key, and the private half of the projector's key. There are several stages of decryption, allowing a mostly uncompressed and decrypted stream to be presented to the final stage electronics. The decryption at the projector stage is lightweight, as it is less likely to be subjected to a significant cryptographic attack because it relies on having fully authenticated equipment elsewhere in the chain.
The servers regularly contact an authentication centre, so that audits can be made as to the number of showings. The servers also come with tamper-resistant housings which then disable the system until it can once again contact the auth centre. There is a bunch of other security stuff, the projectors are never sold, but only licensed to the theatre for a fixed time and have to be returned or inspected at regular intervals.
From the article, it sounds like they only have the "medium" quality screens going in, at 2k by 1k pixels. This means they'll only be installed in smaller theatres, because such low resolution looks really bad on larger screens. Also, the compression isn't lossless, like the/. summary said, but near-lossless, probably a Fraunhofer MP4 encoding set to a medium to high quality setting.
F-G will be showing off these projectors this year at CeBit, according to marketing bumpf I got from them recently. This BBC story is probably based on a press release from the building tsunami of announcements leading up to CeBit.
First, a slashdot effect only last a few hours. To really hit a site, the editors would need to describe the link as a photo site of Nathalie Portman dumping a bowl of hot grits down her pants.
But after a few fake postings like that,/.ers would stop following links.
Then you have the stories posted by Michael, which would have his bizarre editorial comments to drive people away.
Even worse, over the next weekend, Commander Toco, who never reads his own site, would post a duplicate causing a newly cleaned up site to have a second slashdotting.
You quoted from TFA, but you didn't even read what you pasted.
Cable had about 50% europe-wide in 2000, that was 5 years ago as xDSL had only been around for a year. Now, in 2005, its down to less than 30%. In another 5 years, according to the research monkey who drew a straight line on a calendar, it will hit 15%. Presumably a few years after that, it will be negative:-)
Probably a safe statement. None of the cable providers I know allow "true" internet connections. No servers, firewalls everywhere, no incoming connections, capped usage, oversubscribed to death. The capitals and major cities with big cable monopolies are the only places left offering cable internet. I haven't seen it in any smaller city.
Many of the smaller xDSL providers are tearing into the cable and incumbent xDSL markets by offering true internet connections. Uncapped levels of traffic, servers and incoming connections allowed, no filtering or firewalling, IPv6, all the goodies that businesses require.
Just to make the 'merkins jealous, I've got 10Mbps symetrical at home. But on a visit to friends in France recently, they had a new FreeBox version 4, with 12 Mbps down and 768k up. I couldn't even make their downloads lag pulling a ton of stuff down from some of my big servers. Sweet. To top it off, they only pay 29 euros per month for the service, which includes a static IP address, reverse DNS, and no cap.
I have records of job searches and results going back to 1991.
I use a few different ways of keeping track of various job hunts, client searches, proposals and anything relating to work.
I have a big spiral bound notebook I bought in 1991, and wrote a big title on the bright red covers "Job Log". I have sections for each year I was actively searching for a job. Each phone contact merits at least one line, typically 2. Date & time, name of company, person talked to, phone number (so useful to not have to look up again), summary of conversation, summary of position, note if anything was sent or received as a result. It takes about 20-60 seconds to fill out a line after a call. 1993 has about 10 pages full. 2001 and 2002 cover about 60 pages. 1997 had 3 lines before I got a job, and there isn't another entry for that year because each job led to another through personal contacts. I keep this notebook handy when actively job hunting, so I can flip through it if someone calls and update it in seconds after hanging up. As the review of User Friendly's dead tree edition says "Excellent data integrity, but the search function sucks".
Next I have a bunch of flat computer files, containing a similar set of data, some are duplicates of what is written down in the phone log. Easy to grep. These were built and maintained on the days when I sat down with nothing better to do than spend a whole day job searching. When I'm unemployed, I consider my job to be searching for a new job. Get up at 8:00 AM, shower, eat, sit at 'puter and work through job listings until at least lunch time. A good day will see maybe 5-10 directed contacts, and maybe 10 shotgun style blind mailings. Job hunting happens in little flurries, a bunch of contacts go out, then you sit and wait for replies before repeating the cycle. Spend extra effort during the waiting by documenting every lead and file it all away neatly in text files. You will thank yourself later for the little extra effort when that one great job starts to look solid, but its been 3 months and you can't remember what the original ad looked like or what you bragged about on your CV (but the recruiter does).
I start with a main directory for the year and sub-directories per month and per contact. Into these directories I place copies of every CV ever sent, whether in text, rtf, word or pdf format. I also add small text file notes, pasting the email or web page and putting my own follow up notes.
I also have emails going back almost forever, fully archived and searchable by year. One whole branch is just job searches. I have filters set up to make copies of every email sent to recruiter domains, so I can search back and see that I sent out a CV as an attachment from directory cv02/jan/01_somecompany/CV_AntiCypher.doc. Eudora, lookout, pine, just about any email MUA except thunderbird deals correctly with my sub-directory email archive for searches.
I use M$ word for maintaining my CV, about 80% of HR groups and recruiters require this format. It is constantly evolving, and gets updated with every new request for a copy. The CV I send out always fits easily in 3 pages, a lot of older stuff gets left out. When someone tells me the job requires some arcane skill I have, I just add relevant bits to the one going out. Each CV gets a type of serial number embeded so I can see who is passing around my CVs. Having a customised CV for each job means I'm more likely to trigger keyword searches, which has both positive and bizarre results.
Combine the serialising of the CV with email and both electronic notes and a written notebook, and I can look up any query about a job search or proposition even years later. I can tell how much I asked for, what was offered, and I know who answers their phones and who never bothered to call me back. I also like to see how my CV has evolved over the decades, although the early versions done in word on windoze 3.1 or macwrite on OS6 don't seem to open any more. WTF? Nissus?!?
Maybe they should have put a cover over the damn button then
If I ever catch anyone putting a cover over a critical piece of safety equipment, like an Emergency Power Cutoff switch, I'll put their head on a pole in front of the data centre as a warning to others.
Never fuck with safety equipment. It would be better to not have kit directly next to the big red button, leaving it a nice clear space so in an emergency someone could reach it and maybe save your life.
the AC
Yeah, I got a 208 volt jolt at RedBus today. Fucking check your hot and neutral orientation, shitheads!
I just RTFA, and there wasn't one mention of bone saws, power drills, or plastic explosives. How else would one get into the mind of a virus writer?
The only acceptable process for getting into the mind of a virus writer should be both irreversable and serve as a warning to others.
the AC
Re:Iceland is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st Century
on
Hydrogen Buses In Iceland
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
sabinm so succinctly puts it "I don't understand"
As someone living with an islandur, and having worked in Iceland a few times, there is a lot of 21st century products they can export. Knowledge, information, and beautiful women (and guys, supposedly, I'm no judge).
Iceland has an amazing internet infrastructure and very cheap electricity. I'm always astounded when I visit, because everyone leaves the heat (100% electric) turned up 24 hours/day, leaves their computers on all the time, have broadband and use it as much as I do. Their electricity is about 3% the price of what I pay at home, basically close to free. If you live with an Icelander, its a constant battle to get her to turn off lights when leaving the room, keep the heat at a reasonable level and turn it down at night.
On top of extremely cheap energy, they have good schools, excellent health care, and a standard of living supposedly the best in Europe (couldn't possibly be, beer is too expensive). The only downside is the constant rain and occasional snow. With fish stocks in the north atlantic dwindling, they are turning their skills towards information, the petroleum of the 21st century. Reverse engineering and process improvement are becoming their stock in trade, and slowly they are coming around to the idea they have to train up their young people to the highest level possible in fields like Information Science. The biggest problem is that when they send their young people to universities in Europe and America, there is a tendancy to stay abroad. They return when starting a family to take advantage of the social safety net that doesn't exist in places like America.
Don't discount Iceland, they do have a political will to make significant changes, and a per capita GDP to make it happen.
There are collection agencies out there who will pursue judgements against defendents who lose court cases. In this case, the ISP can identify the person or people behind each company with the help of ROKSO, spamhaus, and friends. He can then get the judgement directly named against them, then sell the judgement on. Collection agencies are bottom feeding scum, just like spammers, so they'll have no problem in mucking around the trailer parks of south florida.
Collection agencies will keep a percentage of the money recovered, anywhere from 20% to 90%, depending on the difficulty in getting the money. They are persistent, and tend to circumvent inconveniences like bankruptcies or moving from state to state. They'll grab money from a bank account, after showing the bank officer the original judgement, then let the defendent return to court to try and get it back. Habeus Cashus.
With a billion dollars in judgements, I would bet there are a handful of sleazy but effective collection agencies who will take on the debt knowing they'll be able to collect small amounts here and there for the life of the spammers. It all depends on grabbing the cash before the other agencies.
I was refering to the temperature during december to february. I thought my experiences with extreme cold in Poland and Finland could never be topped, until I got stranded in Chicago for a week. All the people in Chicago were walking around saying "It could be worse, we could be in Minnesota".
1.0 means they have transitioned from alpha grade early release project to a first beta release.
Thunderbird is missing too many basic features to allow it to be rolled out to corporate users, or family members, or just about anyone not 100% geek. It still doesn't handle outgoing servers correctly. Filtering is difficult to use, can't deal with IMAP correctly, and sometimes just doesn't work at all.
The spam filtering still needs a lot of work, there needs to be an option to white list the entire set of local (and/or ldap) address books, not just a single one. When people keep separate address books for business and personal contacts, you then have to choose which book to whitelist. There's been a bug in bugzilla for quite a while now on that one.
LDAP incompatibilities, IMAP SSL handling, customisable UI, IPv6 support, the list goes on and on. I would have prefered if the dev team spent a few more months dealing with all the little problems that will keep this entirely out of business rollouts, and fixed the minor bugs which have lingered forever.
Maybe with the 1.0 early beta release, the current dev team will move on, and more capable Open Source volunteers will step up and finish the job. I, like many others, were driven away from the forums and bugzilla because of hostile attitudes and incessant bickering over extremely minor points. We tried to help, but some FLOSS projects aren't as deserving as others.
I haven't been able to convince anyone to switch over to 0.9 from outlook, or even Pine (so you know its got to suck). No major feature requests were addressed between 0.9 and 1.0, this is just a minor incremental release.
Sure Europe is a country. Oh fuck, I've been living too close to Brussels for too long. Well, ok, its not a country.....yet.
Your post is one big troll. You clearly don't have any idea about the tax laws, even the smallest shops know about intra-community tax numbers and what local withholdings are. There are 375 million europeans, and the system works pretty much the same for all of us, whether in Finland or Portugal. It is much simpler than the US tax code.
There isn't any rampant anti-Americanism going on over here. Sure there were some anti-war demonstrations last year, but that was about it. There is some anti-bushism going on, but we like americans, even the ones from red states (we'll speak slowly for you if you're from a red state:-) But if you are mindlessly repeating what Fox news spews at you, then you clearly have a very warped sense of reality.
If the OP truly has lots of experience in a niche high-tech market, he'll be able to find a job over here with no problem. Companies here are always looking for experienced workers, because they are overwhelmed by newbies with only 1-2 years of java or VB. The breadth of knowledge most american tech workers have (because they lose their job every 6 months and have to start anew) is attractive to some European employers.
A troll, or perhaps just an ignorant american. Hard to discerne from this distance.
the AC
Unless the OP is from Chicago or Minnesota, you don't want to be pointing him at eastern european countries right about now
I gave this advice on/. a couple of years ago (an almost identical ask slashdot), and I think it still holds.
Nobody is going to hire you away from the colonies. What a big risk for a HR drone to make, and the trail of paperwork left behind could be damaging to the company if they need to get rid of you later.
You need to show up in person. You need to show the prospective employers you speak the local lingo fluently, at least well enough to get by in meetings and talking on the phone to customers. By meeting them in person, you show you are already established in the area, so they will not have relocation costs. You need to network, and the best way to do that is to make friends in bars, churches, and other social scenes, then ask around for contacts. Everyone has a cousin or ex-girlfriend who is a web designer or knows word processing (which in reality is a network engineer or a coder). Meet them, buy them beers, let them know you are looking for job leads.
Plan on spending a few months "as a backpacker", because its illegal to come over and just start looking for work on a tourist visa (same as going to the US and then getting a job). So make sure you have two trips planned, and money put aside to survive the first few months of being a non-working tourist. In the spare time when you aren't networking, take language classes to get up to fluency.
As soon as you get out of the airport, you can settle down in a rented apartment and start your networking. But if you accept a job with a company, let them know you have to return to the US for a couple of weeks, and get the job contract in writing before you leave.
When you return to the US with a job offer from a company, it will make getting the visa application so much easier. Allow a few weeks of bureaucracy through the embassy/consulate, and when you next enter the country you'll have a valid visa for working. It also allows you to bring back a ton more luggage for you and your wife.
I'd also suggest, if you have a quite specialised skill, of doing the independant contactor route. Fixed term contract, specific project plan, specific termination date. In much of europe, it is much harder to hire and fire permanent workers. Orders of magnitude more difficult in places like France and Germany. But contractors are loved by high-tech places with specific projects. They know you won't stick around on their payroll at the end, forcing them to find another similar job for you. Use your time in each job networking for your next job, it takes a lot longer over here than in the US to pick up a new contract.
As a fall back plan, create a one person company in the US (or better yet, Quebec for francophone countries) and bill through that. You'll be outside the social net of the local country, and miss out on many of the benefits, but its a way to avoid all kinds of visa questions if you can't get a residency permit.
Yes, many countries have a set aside number of work permits for highly paid professionals. Try getting in on the scheme early in the year, because once they use up the number, you are fucked until the next january.
Working in France in a high tech job is easy, if you speak fluent French. Not just high school french, you need to be able to understand, and be understood, by the visa officers. I know quite a few americans working in France, some of whom are using a Deleware corporation and losing 8-10% of their money shipping it back and forth across the atlantic. They only pay US taxes, and have no social benefits or health care over here. Others have either married a French citizen or got sponsored through some other channels and are in the healthcare sytem.
The language barrier is the same in Portugal. If you try to get a job/visa there, you must be able to navigate the entire beauracracy in fluent Portugese. They are having a small telecoms boom right now, but the employers will require near perfect fluency in the local language because all their meetings and memos are in Portugese.
Beware, as an american you have to pay income tax based on your citizenship, not on the location of where you earned your money. If you get into a high paying job which doesn't require a visa, you will probably have to pay your 40% american taxes, as well as your 30%-60% local taxes and withholdings. That can leave very little left over at the end of the year. The only good thing about president bush, he raised the limit before americans have to pay taxes, but you'll have to google that number yourself.
Believe it or not, the last year or so I've taken on a handful of jobs helping morons^Wpeople with their windoze infected computers.
I have a strong reputation in my field as a guy who doesn't tolerate windoze in any way. I consult on large telecoms projects, building networks which span entire continents. All of it is *nix based, or cisco, or really big expensive boxes. If I'm designing a secure network for a client, I isolate all the windoze lusers behind firewalls, on their own segments with their own IDSes.
At home, I've only got one poky old windoze box for doing a few things that can only be done on windows, like converting visio2k docs to something useful, or looking at the latest joke.wmv video going around. My windoze box never gets rebuilt, patched, or played with very much. I've got sparcservers, BSD boxen, routers, voice switches, and of course, several macintoshes to occupy my time at home. So I don't get exposed to the latest windoze horrors unless I go out looking for it.
I let my lawyer's wife talk me into setting up a PC for one of her friends. That led into about ten jobs over the last year setting up windoze + DSL + printer + camera typical home installations. Quite an eye opener going to someone's house to see the damage done by their daughter putting a CD-ROM from a cereal box into the machine, and having AOL+crap installed permanently all over the system. Watching thousands of pr0n site popups covering the desktop from the first moment the computer is booted. Trying, and failing, to clean up infections with a whole array of anti-malware tools. Seeing the damage done by XP SP2 installs.
I have a standard set of fees, 150 euros for a simple problem (spyware or setup a new PC), 250 euros if the job takes more than 4 hours, and 350 euros if I can't recover the PC and have to re-install the OS with data recovery. Its just enough to keep people from trying to get free support from a smart guy, and makes a day off interesting. For my own benefit, I get to keep up on the horror that is the M$ universe, without it tainting my professional reputation. It has a fun side too, because although my colleagues never see me near a 'doze box, I always seem to know the excruciating details of the latest malware, cleaners, patches and problems.
I do other odd jobs as well, for relaxation more than money. I'm the sound guy for a group of professional musicians, but their audio gear rivals my home telecoms gear just in a different geek arena. I've got my name on three of their CDs as Audio Engineer. A few summers ago when the tech market collapsed and I had house payments to make, I worked as a tour guide on a brewery circuit.
I downloaded (and mirrored for clients) the windoze and linux images early this morning (european time). The DL speeds were pretty fast, but since/. and a bunch of news sites have picked up the story the servers are completely overloaded.
I'll be updating machines over the next week, but many will have to wait until needed extensions and themes are ready. There really needs to be an Internet Exploder theme, so I can put FF on idio^Wclient's machines and tell them I've updated them to the latest version of the internet.
Nope. Today is the 4082nd day of September, 1993. It still hasn't ended. It may never end. There will always be AOLers fucking things up for the rest of us.
I've already got first dibs on fuck.eu. I put in a bid to the commission to run the.eu TLD back in 2001, but they've passed the decision back to ICANNt before going ahead with awarding the contracts.
In all probability there will be some strict guidelines that will be the least unpalatable to everone in Brussels. That translates to "an unworkable mess of rules that some scum will exploit, some big businesses will abuse, and will lock out most reasonable requests". Cynical, moi?
the AC also wanting ilove.eu, ihate.eu, fuckthe.eu, fork.eu, me.eu, notme.eu, etc
I just used up a mod point +1 Informative on it, but it isn't showing up. It went from +4 Funny to +5 Funny, so clearly its an average rather than the last mod point being shown.
Its a friday nite, and I'm stuck at home with a case of beer reading/. Time to go waste the rest of my mod points:-)
the AC Trolls to the left of me, flamers to the right, here I am stuck on/. with you
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the St. Stephens Green Shopping Centre will be packed solid with shoppers at noon on a sunny Saturday. That will make it difficult just to get around, and the hunters will probably annoy a lot of people. It's a pretty lame spot, just three levels around a central open space. Not too many spots for a fox to hide or move around easily.
;-)
I hope the weather reports are correct for Dublin, sunshine and 10 degrees for Saturday. The continent has been fucking c*ld this week, the snow hasn't melted since the storm a week ago. But Dublin seems to have escaped the worst of this last siberean blast.
The park should be a good place for a hunt. Lots of curving trails, open spaces, and hidden areas. If the fox is wearing a large parka and has the kit stowed under the jacket, there isn't going to be any good way to just spot them.
The most fun part will be running around in the Temple Bar area. Teams will have to search every bar carefully, long enough to sample the Guinness. After confirming the fox is not in any of 8 or 9 bars, teams will not really feel the urgency to return to the hunt, and a good time will be had by all
the AC
You mean, the winner of the contest can shout us all a few rounds of Guinness after the hunt. Brilliant!
the AC
Are there such things as video projectors that accept an encrypted stream of data?
/. summary said, but near-lossless, probably a Fraunhofer MP4 encoding set to a medium to high quality setting.
Yes, which is what these systems will be using. Fraunhofer-gessellschaft (of MP3 encoder fame) is the technology behind these projectors. The stream is encrypted the entire length of the data path until it hits the electronics driving the LCD screen. Each server has a key built in, supposedly impossible to recover without destroying the system. Each film to be distributed is encrypted with both a master key, and the private half of the projector's key. There are several stages of decryption, allowing a mostly uncompressed and decrypted stream to be presented to the final stage electronics. The decryption at the projector stage is lightweight, as it is less likely to be subjected to a significant cryptographic attack because it relies on having fully authenticated equipment elsewhere in the chain.
The servers regularly contact an authentication centre, so that audits can be made as to the number of showings. The servers also come with tamper-resistant housings which then disable the system until it can once again contact the auth centre. There is a bunch of other security stuff, the projectors are never sold, but only licensed to the theatre for a fixed time and have to be returned or inspected at regular intervals.
From the article, it sounds like they only have the "medium" quality screens going in, at 2k by 1k pixels. This means they'll only be installed in smaller theatres, because such low resolution looks really bad on larger screens. Also, the compression isn't lossless, like the
F-G will be showing off these projectors this year at CeBit, according to marketing bumpf I got from them recently. This BBC story is probably based on a press release from the building tsunami of announcements leading up to CeBit.
the AC
No, the line should read:
:-)
127.0.0.1 www.drudgereport.com
There's a great pr0n/fetishist site there
the AC
The main star of the site even looks like me
Too many things wrong with this.
/.ers would stop following links.
First, a slashdot effect only last a few hours. To really hit a site, the editors would need to describe the link as a photo site of Nathalie Portman dumping a bowl of hot grits down her pants.
But after a few fake postings like that,
Then you have the stories posted by Michael, which would have his bizarre editorial comments to drive people away.
Even worse, over the next weekend, Commander Toco, who never reads his own site, would post a duplicate causing a newly cleaned up site to have a second slashdotting.
the AC
slashdot makes an effective one time weapon
"the people"
You seem to be making a common mistake, anthropomorphizing AOLers.
At least you put the term in quotes, to indicate you are using a non-traditional or alternate meaning.
the AC
You quoted from TFA, but you didn't even read what you pasted.
:-)
Cable had about 50% europe-wide in 2000, that was 5 years ago as xDSL had only been around for a year. Now, in 2005, its down to less than 30%. In another 5 years, according to the research monkey who drew a straight line on a calendar, it will hit 15%. Presumably a few years after that, it will be negative
Probably a safe statement. None of the cable providers I know allow "true" internet connections. No servers, firewalls everywhere, no incoming connections, capped usage, oversubscribed to death. The capitals and major cities with big cable monopolies are the only places left offering cable internet. I haven't seen it in any smaller city.
Many of the smaller xDSL providers are tearing into the cable and incumbent xDSL markets by offering true internet connections. Uncapped levels of traffic, servers and incoming connections allowed, no filtering or firewalling, IPv6, all the goodies that businesses require.
Just to make the 'merkins jealous, I've got 10Mbps symetrical at home. But on a visit to friends in France recently, they had a new FreeBox version 4, with 12 Mbps down and 768k up. I couldn't even make their downloads lag pulling a ton of stuff down from some of my big servers. Sweet. To top it off, they only pay 29 euros per month for the service, which includes a static IP address, reverse DNS, and no cap.
the AC
I have records of job searches and results going back to 1991.
I use a few different ways of keeping track of various job hunts, client searches, proposals and anything relating to work.
I have a big spiral bound notebook I bought in 1991, and wrote a big title on the bright red covers "Job Log". I have sections for each year I was actively searching for a job. Each phone contact merits at least one line, typically 2. Date & time, name of company, person talked to, phone number (so useful to not have to look up again), summary of conversation, summary of position, note if anything was sent or received as a result. It takes about 20-60 seconds to fill out a line after a call. 1993 has about 10 pages full. 2001 and 2002 cover about 60 pages. 1997 had 3 lines before I got a job, and there isn't another entry for that year because each job led to another through personal contacts. I keep this notebook handy when actively job hunting, so I can flip through it if someone calls and update it in seconds after hanging up. As the review of User Friendly's dead tree edition says "Excellent data integrity, but the search function sucks".
Next I have a bunch of flat computer files, containing a similar set of data, some are duplicates of what is written down in the phone log. Easy to grep. These were built and maintained on the days when I sat down with nothing better to do than spend a whole day job searching. When I'm unemployed, I consider my job to be searching for a new job. Get up at 8:00 AM, shower, eat, sit at 'puter and work through job listings until at least lunch time. A good day will see maybe 5-10 directed contacts, and maybe 10 shotgun style blind mailings. Job hunting happens in little flurries, a bunch of contacts go out, then you sit and wait for replies before repeating the cycle. Spend extra effort during the waiting by documenting every lead and file it all away neatly in text files. You will thank yourself later for the little extra effort when that one great job starts to look solid, but its been 3 months and you can't remember what the original ad looked like or what you bragged about on your CV (but the recruiter does).
I start with a main directory for the year and sub-directories per month and per contact. Into these directories I place copies of every CV ever sent, whether in text, rtf, word or pdf format. I also add small text file notes, pasting the email or web page and putting my own follow up notes.
I also have emails going back almost forever, fully archived and searchable by year. One whole branch is just job searches. I have filters set up to make copies of every email sent to recruiter domains, so I can search back and see that I sent out a CV as an attachment from directory cv02/jan/01_somecompany/CV_AntiCypher.doc. Eudora, lookout, pine, just about any email MUA except thunderbird deals correctly with my sub-directory email archive for searches.
I use M$ word for maintaining my CV, about 80% of HR groups and recruiters require this format. It is constantly evolving, and gets updated with every new request for a copy. The CV I send out always fits easily in 3 pages, a lot of older stuff gets left out. When someone tells me the job requires some arcane skill I have, I just add relevant bits to the one going out. Each CV gets a type of serial number embeded so I can see who is passing around my CVs. Having a customised CV for each job means I'm more likely to trigger keyword searches, which has both positive and bizarre results.
Combine the serialising of the CV with email and both electronic notes and a written notebook, and I can look up any query about a job search or proposition even years later. I can tell how much I asked for, what was offered, and I know who answers their phones and who never bothered to call me back. I also like to see how my CV has evolved over the decades, although the early versions done in word on windoze 3.1 or macwrite on OS6 don't seem to open any more. WTF? Nissus?!?
Keeping track of my personal inf
Maybe they should have put a cover over the damn button then
If I ever catch anyone putting a cover over a critical piece of safety equipment, like an Emergency Power Cutoff switch, I'll put their head on a pole in front of the data centre as a warning to others.
Never fuck with safety equipment. It would be better to not have kit directly next to the big red button, leaving it a nice clear space so in an emergency someone could reach it and maybe save your life.
the AC
Yeah, I got a 208 volt jolt at RedBus today. Fucking check your hot and neutral orientation, shitheads!
I just RTFA, and there wasn't one mention of bone saws, power drills, or plastic explosives. How else would one get into the mind of a virus writer?
The only acceptable process for getting into the mind of a virus writer should be both irreversable and serve as a warning to others.
the AC
sabinm so succinctly puts it "I don't understand"
/.
As someone living with an islandur, and having worked in Iceland a few times, there is a lot of 21st century products they can export. Knowledge, information, and beautiful women (and guys, supposedly, I'm no judge).
Iceland has an amazing internet infrastructure and very cheap electricity. I'm always astounded when I visit, because everyone leaves the heat (100% electric) turned up 24 hours/day, leaves their computers on all the time, have broadband and use it as much as I do. Their electricity is about 3% the price of what I pay at home, basically close to free. If you live with an Icelander, its a constant battle to get her to turn off lights when leaving the room, keep the heat at a reasonable level and turn it down at night.
On top of extremely cheap energy, they have good schools, excellent health care, and a standard of living supposedly the best in Europe (couldn't possibly be, beer is too expensive). The only downside is the constant rain and occasional snow. With fish stocks in the north atlantic dwindling, they are turning their skills towards information, the petroleum of the 21st century. Reverse engineering and process improvement are becoming their stock in trade, and slowly they are coming around to the idea they have to train up their young people to the highest level possible in fields like Information Science. The biggest problem is that when they send their young people to universities in Europe and America, there is a tendancy to stay abroad. They return when starting a family to take advantage of the social safety net that doesn't exist in places like America.
Don't discount Iceland, they do have a political will to make significant changes, and a per capita GDP to make it happen.
the AC
I can't believe I'm defending Iceland on
having an impulse to suddenly go around traffic via the sidewalk
:-)
So move to Paris, Athens or Rome
Then you'll understand the proper way to drive. Of course, its difficult to go back to the States after a few years driving in Europe.
the AC
There are collection agencies out there who will pursue judgements against defendents who lose court cases. In this case, the ISP can identify the person or people behind each company with the help of ROKSO, spamhaus, and friends. He can then get the judgement directly named against them, then sell the judgement on. Collection agencies are bottom feeding scum, just like spammers, so they'll have no problem in mucking around the trailer parks of south florida.
Collection agencies will keep a percentage of the money recovered, anywhere from 20% to 90%, depending on the difficulty in getting the money. They are persistent, and tend to circumvent inconveniences like bankruptcies or moving from state to state. They'll grab money from a bank account, after showing the bank officer the original judgement, then let the defendent return to court to try and get it back. Habeus Cashus.
With a billion dollars in judgements, I would bet there are a handful of sleazy but effective collection agencies who will take on the debt knowing they'll be able to collect small amounts here and there for the life of the spammers. It all depends on grabbing the cash before the other agencies.
the AC
I was refering to the temperature during december to february. I thought my experiences with extreme cold in Poland and Finland could never be topped, until I got stranded in Chicago for a week. All the people in Chicago were walking around saying "It could be worse, we could be in Minnesota".
the AC
1.0 means they have transitioned from alpha grade early release project to a first beta release.
Thunderbird is missing too many basic features to allow it to be rolled out to corporate users, or family members, or just about anyone not 100% geek. It still doesn't handle outgoing servers correctly. Filtering is difficult to use, can't deal with IMAP correctly, and sometimes just doesn't work at all.
The spam filtering still needs a lot of work, there needs to be an option to white list the entire set of local (and/or ldap) address books, not just a single one. When people keep separate address books for business and personal contacts, you then have to choose which book to whitelist. There's been a bug in bugzilla for quite a while now on that one.
LDAP incompatibilities, IMAP SSL handling, customisable UI, IPv6 support, the list goes on and on. I would have prefered if the dev team spent a few more months dealing with all the little problems that will keep this entirely out of business rollouts, and fixed the minor bugs which have lingered forever.
Maybe with the 1.0 early beta release, the current dev team will move on, and more capable Open Source volunteers will step up and finish the job. I, like many others, were driven away from the forums and bugzilla because of hostile attitudes and incessant bickering over extremely minor points. We tried to help, but some FLOSS projects aren't as deserving as others.
I haven't been able to convince anyone to switch over to 0.9 from outlook, or even Pine (so you know its got to suck). No major feature requests were addressed between 0.9 and 1.0, this is just a minor incremental release.
Yeah, call me cranky too!
the AC
Sure Europe is a country. Oh fuck, I've been living too close to Brussels for too long. Well, ok, its not a country.....yet.
:-) But if you are mindlessly repeating what Fox news spews at you, then you clearly have a very warped sense of reality.
Your post is one big troll. You clearly don't have any idea about the tax laws, even the smallest shops know about intra-community tax numbers and what local withholdings are. There are 375 million europeans, and the system works pretty much the same for all of us, whether in Finland or Portugal. It is much simpler than the US tax code.
There isn't any rampant anti-Americanism going on over here. Sure there were some anti-war demonstrations last year, but that was about it. There is some anti-bushism going on, but we like americans, even the ones from red states (we'll speak slowly for you if you're from a red state
If the OP truly has lots of experience in a niche high-tech market, he'll be able to find a job over here with no problem. Companies here are always looking for experienced workers, because they are overwhelmed by newbies with only 1-2 years of java or VB. The breadth of knowledge most american tech workers have (because they lose their job every 6 months and have to start anew) is attractive to some European employers.
A troll, or perhaps just an ignorant american. Hard to discerne from this distance.
the AC
Unless the OP is from Chicago or Minnesota, you don't want to be pointing him at eastern european countries right about now
I gave this advice on /. a couple of years ago (an almost identical ask slashdot), and I think it still holds.
Nobody is going to hire you away from the colonies. What a big risk for a HR drone to make, and the trail of paperwork left behind could be damaging to the company if they need to get rid of you later.
You need to show up in person. You need to show the prospective employers you speak the local lingo fluently, at least well enough to get by in meetings and talking on the phone to customers. By meeting them in person, you show you are already established in the area, so they will not have relocation costs. You need to network, and the best way to do that is to make friends in bars, churches, and other social scenes, then ask around for contacts. Everyone has a cousin or ex-girlfriend who is a web designer or knows word processing (which in reality is a network engineer or a coder). Meet them, buy them beers, let them know you are looking for job leads.
Plan on spending a few months "as a backpacker", because its illegal to come over and just start looking for work on a tourist visa (same as going to the US and then getting a job). So make sure you have two trips planned, and money put aside to survive the first few months of being a non-working tourist. In the spare time when you aren't networking, take language classes to get up to fluency.
As soon as you get out of the airport, you can settle down in a rented apartment and start your networking. But if you accept a job with a company, let them know you have to return to the US for a couple of weeks, and get the job contract in writing before you leave.
When you return to the US with a job offer from a company, it will make getting the visa application so much easier. Allow a few weeks of bureaucracy through the embassy/consulate, and when you next enter the country you'll have a valid visa for working. It also allows you to bring back a ton more luggage for you and your wife.
I'd also suggest, if you have a quite specialised skill, of doing the independant contactor route. Fixed term contract, specific project plan, specific termination date. In much of europe, it is much harder to hire and fire permanent workers. Orders of magnitude more difficult in places like France and Germany. But contractors are loved by high-tech places with specific projects. They know you won't stick around on their payroll at the end, forcing them to find another similar job for you. Use your time in each job networking for your next job, it takes a lot longer over here than in the US to pick up a new contract.
As a fall back plan, create a one person company in the US (or better yet, Quebec for francophone countries) and bill through that. You'll be outside the social net of the local country, and miss out on many of the benefits, but its a way to avoid all kinds of visa questions if you can't get a residency permit.
the AC
Yes, many countries have a set aside number of work permits for highly paid professionals. Try getting in on the scheme early in the year, because once they use up the number, you are fucked until the next january.
Working in France in a high tech job is easy, if you speak fluent French. Not just high school french, you need to be able to understand, and be understood, by the visa officers. I know quite a few americans working in France, some of whom are using a Deleware corporation and losing 8-10% of their money shipping it back and forth across the atlantic. They only pay US taxes, and have no social benefits or health care over here. Others have either married a French citizen or got sponsored through some other channels and are in the healthcare sytem.
The language barrier is the same in Portugal. If you try to get a job/visa there, you must be able to navigate the entire beauracracy in fluent Portugese. They are having a small telecoms boom right now, but the employers will require near perfect fluency in the local language because all their meetings and memos are in Portugese.
Beware, as an american you have to pay income tax based on your citizenship, not on the location of where you earned your money. If you get into a high paying job which doesn't require a visa, you will probably have to pay your 40% american taxes, as well as your 30%-60% local taxes and withholdings. That can leave very little left over at the end of the year. The only good thing about president bush, he raised the limit before americans have to pay taxes, but you'll have to google that number yourself.
the AC
Believe it or not, the last year or so I've taken on a handful of jobs helping morons^Wpeople with their windoze infected computers.
.wmv video going around. My windoze box never gets rebuilt, patched, or played with very much. I've got sparcservers, BSD boxen, routers, voice switches, and of course, several macintoshes to occupy my time at home. So I don't get exposed to the latest windoze horrors unless I go out looking for it.
I have a strong reputation in my field as a guy who doesn't tolerate windoze in any way. I consult on large telecoms projects, building networks which span entire continents. All of it is *nix based, or cisco, or really big expensive boxes. If I'm designing a secure network for a client, I isolate all the windoze lusers behind firewalls, on their own segments with their own IDSes.
At home, I've only got one poky old windoze box for doing a few things that can only be done on windows, like converting visio2k docs to something useful, or looking at the latest joke
I let my lawyer's wife talk me into setting up a PC for one of her friends. That led into about ten jobs over the last year setting up windoze + DSL + printer + camera typical home installations. Quite an eye opener going to someone's house to see the damage done by their daughter putting a CD-ROM from a cereal box into the machine, and having AOL+crap installed permanently all over the system. Watching thousands of pr0n site popups covering the desktop from the first moment the computer is booted. Trying, and failing, to clean up infections with a whole array of anti-malware tools. Seeing the damage done by XP SP2 installs.
I have a standard set of fees, 150 euros for a simple problem (spyware or setup a new PC), 250 euros if the job takes more than 4 hours, and 350 euros if I can't recover the PC and have to re-install the OS with data recovery. Its just enough to keep people from trying to get free support from a smart guy, and makes a day off interesting. For my own benefit, I get to keep up on the horror that is the M$ universe, without it tainting my professional reputation. It has a fun side too, because although my colleagues never see me near a 'doze box, I always seem to know the excruciating details of the latest malware, cleaners, patches and problems.
I do other odd jobs as well, for relaxation more than money. I'm the sound guy for a group of professional musicians, but their audio gear rivals my home telecoms gear just in a different geek arena. I've got my name on three of their CDs as Audio Engineer. A few summers ago when the tech market collapsed and I had house payments to make, I worked as a tour guide on a brewery circuit.
the AC
Just how powerful is your laser pointer?
and
Where can I get one?
the AC
I downloaded (and mirrored for clients) the windoze and linux images early this morning (european time). The DL speeds were pretty fast, but since /. and a bunch of news sites have picked up the story the servers are completely overloaded.
I'll be updating machines over the next week, but many will have to wait until needed extensions and themes are ready. There really needs to be an Internet Exploder theme, so I can put FF on idio^Wclient's machines and tell them I've updated them to the latest version of the internet.
the AC
There are people with too much money and too little sense
Upon this dictum I have based my entire existence as a conslutant.
Soon it will be time to retire...
the AC
Maybe I'll buy an Xbox when I retire and start playing games
Nope. Today is the 4082nd day of September, 1993. It still hasn't ended. It may never end. There will always be AOLers fucking things up for the rest of us.
the AC
The asterisk is not allowed.
.eu TLD back in 2001, but they've passed the decision back to ICANNt before going ahead with awarding the contracts.
I've already got first dibs on fuck.eu. I put in a bid to the commission to run the
In all probability there will be some strict guidelines that will be the least unpalatable to everone in Brussels. That translates to "an unworkable mess of rules that some scum will exploit, some big businesses will abuse, and will lock out most reasonable requests". Cynical, moi?
the AC
also wanting ilove.eu, ihate.eu, fuckthe.eu, fork.eu, me.eu, notme.eu, etc
I just used up a mod point +1 Informative on it, but it isn't showing up. It went from +4 Funny to +5 Funny, so clearly its an average rather than the last mod point being shown.
/. Time to go waste the rest of my mod points :-)
/. with you
Its a friday nite, and I'm stuck at home with a case of beer reading
the AC
Trolls to the left of me, flamers to the right, here I am stuck on