If you are doing consulting right, then you give away a part of it for free, which will be your "free interview". If i figure out that a job can be done by talking for twenty minutes over lunch (happens), then i will just do that and tell the guy who i am should a real job turn up.
The result of this is that i am bounced around from interesting project to interesting project (in a big department) - and paid for doign real work - and i got involved in most of the projects by doing small things, which demonstrated my skills and where wtriting a bill would have been more work than doing it "for free". If you solve a thing where the manager thinks its big (but in reality its a 1h job), just do it, dont negotiate. If the company isnt worth it, then dont show up again, otherwise the manager will think "wow" the technicians will think "okay, this guy can be on the team" and you will be happy and respected, and wont have to worry about them bitching around about every hour.
I am not sure in which worl you live in, but in my world i have to fill the forms from the administration in excel or word. Its sad but true.
And most office packages break compatibility with office documents. So a thing which could be two minutes (e.g. fill in a number of hours) requires me to boot my laptop, start windows, start word/excel, wait until it send/receives email (unless i am in the train at a location without mobile network). Takes much longer than on my mobile phone. which inform me when it gets the email, is always on, and i can pull it out in the 10 minute ride in the public transport without major irritations.
So yes, good compatibility with MS office would be a deal changer for me. It would probably influence my next decision to an ipad.
Offerign discount plans for a certain group of customers means charging the others extra.
The roaming is a historical artifact (since most big european providers did not exist for a very long time), and the EU is slowly driving it down. O2 UK, O2 Germany, and O2 Spain may be owned by the same company, but may operate different networks. Sadly, the regulation of the telephone network operation is still a national thing. So you still have one relulatory body per country, with special regulations. A lot about it has happened in the last 25 years. Sadly some things remain (like the oblication to charge for certain things in certain countries). But luckily for you, if you are European they must sell you the same cheap prepaid cards which they also sell for the locals.
Euro problems or not, but for the customers its great here in Europe.
I never had the situation here that a mobile provider tried to force me onto a certain mobile phone. The reason for this is that the European union has a lot of laws regarding the availability of services everywhere and that no competitor may have a disadvantage by closed markets. In the same way the mobility of the cititzens should not be limited.
Soemthing like: "If you use the phone which we did not sell you, we charge extra" would bring you into an overkill of lawsuits. Its not accidentally that MS needs to show the "browser choice" screen in Europe. Its not accidentally that Apple and other ebook publisher got got into trouble here. it not accigentally that Apples warranty conditions clashed here. It is not accidentally that the "one mobile provider sell the iphone" idea broke down in the EU more quickly than elsewhere.
I dont consider *new* languages for which there is no open source implementation of the core language available. This is not because i dont like to pay but because in the case of small languages/domain specific companies you never know ehen they go belly up or are bought and what happens then.
I wonder - if they let google pay for it instead of plainly rejecting that their newspaper contents are displayed there - is that not a terribly stupid move? To me this is like introducing a middleman with a near-monopoly. Does this then also include the right to push these news snippets on android devices? I mean, i thought that the publisher should have learde the lesson from dealing with Apple in that respect.
So will the newspapers haver better card when negotiating the next time or worse?
Many space probes usually include processors and technology levels which are mature at the time of the initial design of the spacecraft, and which are spun of after being mature into a hardened line (probably adjusted structure size).
So: -Lets say 2-3 years assemly and tests of the total system -3-x years design phase -specific design and tests of the hardened line (i dont know, les assume): ~1-2 years -observing operation of the initial processor in designs on boards at nominal operation speeds to make sure its mature: ~3-5 years (if you look at errata in Microcontroller sheets thats usually when they come in)
So we arrive at something at the order of 11years from the release of the inital part to the start of the space vehicle.
So -Columbia (start in 1981) had an IBM AP101, with an architecture from the 60s and based on ttl circuits (while the Commodore 64 was around the corner) -Opportunity (start in 2003) had a version of power-1 processor (1990) -Curiosity (start in 2011) had a version of a powerPC750 (1997)
I second that. I work in an "agile" team, which is a translation of "power point engineers which are on the team for process reasosns and traditionally would have created a list of re need to get the fundamental principle of the software we create explained again in each sprint and therefore lack any vision over more than 3 Month".
-1997: can anubody overcome the DOS/Epoc dominance -2000: can anybody overcome the Palmos dominace -2002: can anybody overcome the WIndows CE dominance? -2005: can anybody overcome the Symbian dominance? -2009: can anybody overcome the Iphone/Blackberry dominance?
Yes, at some point sombody will. Nothing is as fluctuating as PIM devices. They have a well defined set of apps which really will make my buying decision, and i am not hesitant to change the OS. Did that two or three times. If QNX proves to be solid and the the important apps will be right on the next RIM device, why not to switch? If microsoft puts a decent version of mobile office on Windows 8 phones and they dont suck otherwise, why not buy one? If Samsung decides to put another Linux-based and more or less open OS onto the HW which i would have bought with Android, and e.g. the power sonsumption is lower, why not switch?
The things which mattered for my first PIM/Mobile computing devices were: Price, usability and battery life. Nothing changed for me up to now.
that computing not proceeding. Corel draw 3.0 exceeds the capabilities of all vector drawing programs for android easil and it ran with 4MB of ram without problems. Illustrator from the same period still matches inkscape when it comes to plainly makin a drawing (actually it was more user friendly). Word 5.0 for DOS war fine on 512kB of RAM, and describe 4.0 for OS/2 was more responsive on a 486 machine from the area than most word processors are nowadays on a machine 100 time faster.
They have a button which links to an extension which displays something like the old menu additionally. Not sure if they achieved this by standard means or by putting the gun to the head of the MS people while negotiating about MS Office licenses.
Windows 7 is stable, usable, and a sufficient progress over windows XP. WIndows XP dominated the last 10 years, and my prediction is that 7 will dominate on PCs in businesses the next 10 years. The company where i work has finished the Tests and adoption of windows 7 last year and is now rolling it out as the new standard system. And no - i dont belive that they will consider Windows 8. Reducating the employees to the Ribbon interface in office was already something they liked so little that they have their own solution for adding the old menus temporarily.
There is no visible advantage of touch in the office, and that is where MS truely domiates. The idea of touch-pcs is somthing which MS dreams about since at least the mid - 90s. Then they had an epic fail, now they hope they can ride in the waves of the ipad and android.
If "anonymous" (or whoever calls itself like that right now) calls something "warheads" could we please distance our self at least in the title of the story by using apostrophs?
There are several things which i hate about anonymous:
a) Lack of proper hacker culture, These guys are deep within the blackhat zone. You dont use security breaches or DDOS to blackmail somebody. The only allowed thing which comes close to blackmail which may be allowed is "responsible disclosure" = we have documents or knowledge, which will in the public at a certain time. You do it or we do it. To use publicaiton of documents as retaliation for other things is as evil as it can be.
b) A lack of reflection on the things they demand. By shouting "The evil system kill everybody and only helps the big companies and a big bad commander and clique of power-hungry evil persons in the capital and the stock exchange run the world by deals behind closed doors and the elections are a farce, so everybody step down and do what we want because we are 9000 (more likely much less)" they somehow discredit the idea. That they suggest is that a cat-porn "benevolent" (?) dictatorship is better than what we have now. I donâ(TM)t think so
c) Use of militarized language. Really? You want to change society into something where you give people the impression that whoever has the bigger stick is right? Honestly? If i look back at the past 30 years the successful revolutions in the world have not been achieved by having the stronger weapon but by millions of people being unhappy and going to the streets (East Europe, North Africa) or even by discussions and reforms inside the systems (China).
Usually i am less concerned about the border control or the police asking me to decrypt the data on my computer than somebody stealing it and making other use of it, like identity theft.
If i had material which would incriminate me I normally would not take it on a week-logn trave trough a foreign country.
Give the facts, indeed one could guess he had a major depression, and statistically (which is a subject I know) speaking, that is a likely possibility.
I think it is at least a possibility one should consider before respectlessly accusing random people in his life of contributing.
They are innocent until proven guilty, arent they? I mean iff he would have been severely mistreated, left in solitary confinement without seeing daylight or similar, yes, i would see how that could cause him to commit suicide.
But just getting accused of a crime is not something which automatically causes a suicide. Other commenters here made remarks on his friends and relatives.
The simple fact is that depressive people are not all depressive 365x24. Some of them are, some are not. There is a fair number of cases, where somebody is productive, brilliant, socially active and even happy etc during the major part of his life, and has depressive episodes. Unless you want to confine him or give him a nanny around the clock, it is difficult to deal with this fact, since society trains depressive people to hide the depression as long as possible.
Well. I dont think he would have gotten 35 years. The real problem was obviously not the downloading of the articles. This itself would have probably a minor fine, with no civil damage done; which is why JSTOR dropped it. If somebody attempts to steal my money (or valuables) from my bank in a personal safe and fails (or the objects are returned to its place), i also obviously wont sue him, but i have full understanding if the Bank would do. And yes attaching an laptop to a network as a blackhat is bad. For somebody with many years of experience in computing and networking and related issues this is not a "oh i slipped over the line".
The guy was depressive. For the information of the ignorant: Being depressive is not a minor mood thing where you are having a bad day. People who are depressive also sometimes kill themself for no explicit reason. Stating that one thing or the other "must have lead" to this is an obvious case of cognitive bias, while ignoring a taboo-topic. Being depressive is a severe defect. Usually it can be treated. Sometimes sadly not. Its not the fault of the persecutor (which did his job) his family (which often are as helpless as everbody else), his girlfriend or his friends.
a) Heating: Best done on schedule, and automaticlaly controlled. The savings from adjusting to your fluctuation of getting home are miniscule
b) Light? No need to remotly control it.
c) Kitchen devices: The only thing i could imagine would be turnign on the coffee machine before you wake up - and that is not remote control. All other things require manual intervention.
I mean I could imagine that filling the bathtub may be an applicaiton.
a) use an ergonomical setup, chair,table,monitor in the right hight. use a separable keyboard, if you use a laptop.
b) Breaks. when i worked in the lab i usually had 12h work days. Important for long work days: at least 2 bigger breaks, with a meal and a small walk around the building. (every three-four hours). (in the case of my work it happened that there often was a 4h break due to some instrument/measurement, which i used to cycle 10km to the next town, have dinner or go to the movie theater, and return).
c) If your measurent allows, you can also stand up and walk for a few minutes in the lab. Look at the hardware of your measurement (i more often than expected got an idea or found a problem by standing up from the computer)
d) Drink water, not soft drinks (and if the vending machines only sell soft drinks, take care to hake a big bollt of water with you). Buy fruits instead of relying on the sweets from the vending machine
e) No alkohol. Hard work and Alkohol together are not good for your mental state. I have seen peoples mental state deteriorate strongly.
f) if you feel mental side effects, reduce your workload and try to do more with other people. A depression or similar wont help your work and it has bad side effects on your physical health.
g) Plan your measurments a little, if possible. If possible automate.
What really annoys me is that there are many things which are more effective in commiucating asynchronously via email during a few days, in comparison to prolonged discussions in meetings. Why in the world should i sit around whil person A explains to person B somehting which I either no or which is irrelevant for me.
Calling in a meeting because you are to lazy to type a page of text or because you want to enforce a deciusion in your direction by not giving anybody the chance to think about a complex proposal for a day and let it sink in is NOT an appropriate use of everybodies time.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly my thoughts. I am a consultant.
If you are doing consulting right, then you give away a part of it for free, which will be your "free interview". If i figure out that a job can be done by talking for twenty minutes over lunch (happens), then i will just do that and tell the guy who i am should a real job turn up.
The result of this is that i am bounced around from interesting project to interesting project (in a big department) - and paid for doign real work - and i got involved in most of the projects by doing small things, which demonstrated my skills and where wtriting a bill would have been more work than doing it "for free". If you solve a thing where the manager thinks its big (but in reality its a 1h job), just do it, dont negotiate. If the company isnt worth it, then dont show up again, otherwise the manager will think "wow" the technicians will think "okay, this guy can be on the team" and you will be happy and respected, and wont have to worry about them bitching around about every hour.
I am not sure in which worl you live in, but in my world i have to fill the forms from the administration in excel or word. Its sad but true.
And most office packages break compatibility with office documents. So a thing which could be two minutes (e.g. fill in a number of hours) requires me to boot my laptop, start windows, start word/excel, wait until it send/receives email (unless i am in the train at a location without mobile network). Takes much longer than on my mobile phone. which inform me when it gets the email, is always on, and i can pull it out in the 10 minute ride in the public transport without major irritations.
So yes, good compatibility with MS office would be a deal changer for me. It would probably influence my next decision to an ipad.
Apple should probably pay MS to port MS Office to iOS and preinstall it on ipads.
That could tilt the movement to Android back in their direction.
just my 2c
Offerign discount plans for a certain group of customers means charging the others extra.
The roaming is a historical artifact (since most big european providers did not exist for a very long time), and the EU is slowly driving it down. O2 UK, O2 Germany, and O2 Spain may be owned by the same company, but may operate different networks. Sadly, the regulation of the telephone network operation is still a national thing. So you still have one relulatory body per country, with special regulations. A lot about it has happened in the last 25 years. Sadly some things remain (like the oblication to charge for certain things in certain countries). But luckily for you, if you are European they must sell you the same cheap prepaid cards which they also sell for the locals.
Euro problems or not, but for the customers its great here in Europe.
I never had the situation here that a mobile provider tried to force me onto a certain mobile phone. The reason for this is that the European union has a lot of laws regarding the availability of services everywhere and that no competitor may have a disadvantage by closed markets. In the same way the mobility of the cititzens should not be limited.
Soemthing like: "If you use the phone which we did not sell you, we charge extra" would bring you into an overkill of lawsuits. Its not accidentally that MS needs to show the "browser choice" screen in Europe. Its not accidentally that Apple and other ebook publisher got got into trouble here. it not accigentally that Apples warranty conditions clashed here. It is not accidentally that the "one mobile provider sell the iphone" idea broke down in the EU more quickly than elsewhere.
I dont consider *new* languages for which there is no open source implementation of the core language available. This is not because i dont like to pay but because in the case of small languages/domain specific companies you never know ehen they go belly up or are bought and what happens then.
I wonder - if they let google pay for it instead of plainly rejecting that their newspaper contents are displayed there - is that not a terribly stupid move? To me this is like introducing a middleman with a near-monopoly. Does this then also include the right to push these news snippets on android devices? I mean, i thought that the publisher should have learde the lesson from dealing with Apple in that respect.
So will the newspapers haver better card when negotiating the next time or worse?
Many space probes usually include processors and technology levels which are mature at the time of the initial design of the spacecraft, and which are spun of after being mature into a hardened line (probably adjusted structure size).
So:
-Lets say 2-3 years assemly and tests of the total system
-3-x years design phase
-specific design and tests of the hardened line (i dont know, les assume): ~1-2 years
-observing operation of the initial processor in designs on boards at nominal operation speeds to make sure its mature: ~3-5 years (if you look at errata in Microcontroller sheets thats usually when they come in)
So we arrive at something at the order of 11years from the release of the inital part to the start of the space vehicle.
So
-Columbia (start in 1981) had an IBM AP101, with an architecture from the 60s and based on ttl circuits (while the Commodore 64 was around the corner)
-Opportunity (start in 2003) had a version of power-1 processor (1990)
-Curiosity (start in 2011) had a version of a powerPC750 (1997)
I second that. I work in an "agile" team, which is a translation of "power point engineers which are on the team for process reasosns and traditionally would have created a list of re need to get the fundamental principle of the software we create explained again in each sprint and therefore lack any vision over more than 3 Month".
-1997: can anubody overcome the DOS/Epoc dominance
-2000: can anybody overcome the Palmos dominace
-2002: can anybody overcome the WIndows CE dominance?
-2005: can anybody overcome the Symbian dominance?
-2009: can anybody overcome the Iphone/Blackberry dominance?
Yes, at some point sombody will. Nothing is as fluctuating as PIM devices. They have a well defined set of apps which really will make my buying decision, and i am not hesitant to change the OS. Did that two or three times. If QNX proves to be solid and the the important apps will be right on the next RIM device, why not to switch? If microsoft puts a decent version of mobile office on Windows 8 phones and they dont suck otherwise, why not buy one? If Samsung decides to put another Linux-based and more or less open OS onto the HW which i would have bought with Android, and e.g. the power sonsumption is lower, why not switch?
The things which mattered for my first PIM/Mobile computing devices were: Price, usability and battery life. Nothing changed for me up to now.
that computing not proceeding. Corel draw 3.0 exceeds the capabilities of all vector drawing programs for android easil and it ran with 4MB of ram without problems. Illustrator from the same period still matches inkscape when it comes to plainly makin a drawing (actually it was more user friendly). Word 5.0 for DOS war fine on 512kB of RAM, and describe 4.0 for OS/2 was more responsive on a 486 machine from the area than most word processors are nowadays on a machine 100 time faster.
You dont.
They have a button which links to an extension which displays something like the old menu additionally. Not sure if they achieved this by standard means or by putting the gun to the head of the MS people while negotiating about MS Office licenses.
Windows 7 is stable, usable, and a sufficient progress over windows XP. WIndows XP dominated the last 10 years, and my prediction is that 7 will dominate on PCs in businesses the next 10 years. The company where i work has finished the Tests and adoption of windows 7 last year and is now rolling it out as the new standard system. And no - i dont belive that they will consider Windows 8. Reducating the employees to the Ribbon interface in office was already something they liked so little that they have their own solution for adding the old menus temporarily.
There is no visible advantage of touch in the office, and that is where MS truely domiates. The idea of touch-pcs is somthing which MS dreams about since at least the mid - 90s. Then they had an epic fail, now they hope they can ride in the waves of the ipad and android.
If "anonymous" (or whoever calls itself like that right now) calls something "warheads" could we please distance our self at least in the title of the story by using apostrophs?
There are several things which i hate about anonymous:
a) Lack of proper hacker culture, These guys are deep within the blackhat zone. You dont use security breaches or DDOS to blackmail somebody. The only allowed thing which comes close to blackmail which may be allowed is "responsible disclosure" = we have documents or knowledge, which will in the public at a certain time. You do it or we do it. To use publicaiton of documents as retaliation for other things is as evil as it can be.
b) A lack of reflection on the things they demand. By shouting "The evil system kill everybody and only helps the big companies and a big bad commander and clique of power-hungry evil persons in the capital and the stock exchange run the world by deals behind closed doors and the elections are a farce, so everybody step down and do what we want because we are 9000 (more likely much less)" they somehow discredit the idea. That they suggest is that a cat-porn "benevolent" (?) dictatorship is better than what we have now. I donâ(TM)t think so
c) Use of militarized language. Really? You want to change society into something where you give people the impression that whoever has the bigger stick is right? Honestly? If i look back at the past 30 years the successful revolutions in the world have not been achieved by having the stronger weapon but by millions of people being unhappy and going to the streets (East Europe, North Africa) or even by discussions and reforms inside the systems (China).
backups: you heard about amazon glacier, did you?
hosting: you heard about dropbox,amazon s3 or any other provider you like?
Usually i am less concerned about the border control or the police asking me to decrypt the data on my computer than somebody stealing it and making other use of it, like identity theft.
If i had material which would incriminate me I normally would not take it on a week-logn trave trough a foreign country.
Take care that if its stolen it will not be bad for you.
I did not diagnose him at all.
Give the facts, indeed one could guess he had a major depression, and statistically (which is a subject I know) speaking, that is a likely possibility.
I think it is at least a possibility one should consider before respectlessly accusing random people in his life of contributing.
They are innocent until proven guilty, arent they? I mean iff he would have been severely mistreated, left in solitary confinement without seeing daylight or similar, yes, i would see how that could cause him to commit suicide.
But just getting accused of a crime is not something which automatically causes a suicide. Other commenters here made remarks on his friends and relatives.
The simple fact is that depressive people are not all depressive 365x24. Some of them are, some are not. There is a fair number of cases, where somebody is productive, brilliant, socially active and even happy etc during the major part of his life, and has depressive episodes. Unless you want to confine him or give him a nanny around the clock, it is difficult to deal with this fact, since society trains depressive people to hide the depression as long as possible.
Well. I dont think he would have gotten 35 years. The real problem was obviously not the downloading of the articles. This itself would have probably a minor fine, with no civil damage done; which is why JSTOR dropped it. If somebody attempts to steal my money (or valuables) from my bank in a personal safe and fails (or the objects are returned to its place), i also obviously wont sue him, but i have full understanding if the Bank would do. And yes attaching an laptop to a network as a blackhat is bad. For somebody with many years of experience in computing and networking and related issues this is not a "oh i slipped over the line".
The guy was depressive. For the information of the ignorant: Being depressive is not a minor mood thing where you are having a bad day. People who are depressive also sometimes kill themself for no explicit reason. Stating that one thing or the other "must have lead" to this is an obvious case of cognitive bias, while ignoring a taboo-topic. Being depressive is a severe defect. Usually it can be treated. Sometimes sadly not. Its not the fault of the persecutor (which did his job) his family (which often are as helpless as everbody else), his girlfriend or his friends.
Please. I like my wacom tablet, my X41tablet thinkpad and my galaxy note 2.
On a big screen, i want a pen, not a finger
Just some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript should be enough to start. ... You don't need to become an expert, just know the basics, so you're not helpless.'"
As we didnt have enough badly written, insecure and slow web applications which were not designed by somebody whose description fits to the above.....
a) Heating: Best done on schedule, and automaticlaly controlled. The savings from adjusting to your fluctuation of getting home are miniscule
b) Light? No need to remotly control it.
c) Kitchen devices: The only thing i could imagine would be turnign on the coffee machine before you wake up - and that is not remote control. All other things require manual intervention.
I mean I could imagine that filling the bathtub may be an applicaiton.
a) use an ergonomical setup, chair,table,monitor in the right hight. use a separable keyboard, if you use a laptop.
b) Breaks. when i worked in the lab i usually had 12h work days. Important for long work days: at least 2 bigger breaks, with a meal and a small walk around the building. (every three-four hours). (in the case of my work it happened that there often was a 4h break due to some instrument/measurement, which i used to cycle 10km to the next town, have dinner or go to the movie theater, and return).
c) If your measurent allows, you can also stand up and walk for a few minutes in the lab. Look at the hardware of your measurement (i more often than expected got an idea or found a problem by standing up from the computer)
d) Drink water, not soft drinks (and if the vending machines only sell soft drinks, take care to hake a big bollt of water with you). Buy fruits instead of relying on the sweets from the vending machine
e) No alkohol. Hard work and Alkohol together are not good for your mental state. I have seen peoples mental state deteriorate strongly.
f) if you feel mental side effects, reduce your workload and try to do more with other people. A depression or similar wont help your work and it has bad side effects on your physical health.
g) Plan your measurments a little, if possible. If possible automate.
Are these the physical data carriers i used to buy and rip before DRM-free music stores were available?
At least for me it wont boost the cd sales.....
What really annoys me is that there are many things which are more effective in commiucating asynchronously via email during a few days, in comparison to prolonged discussions in meetings. Why in the world should i sit around whil person A explains to person B somehting which I either no or which is irrelevant for me.
Calling in a meeting because you are to lazy to type a page of text or because you want to enforce a deciusion in your direction by not giving anybody the chance to think about a complex proposal for a day and let it sink in is NOT an appropriate use of everybodies time.