While I can certainly see the value of an open office area for teamwork, the idea of shared phones baffles me. I can't imagine having to share phones, even if they are not used often.
I used to run office 2000 with no problems on a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of ram at one job I had. Sometimes access queries took a minute or two but everything else was quite snappy.
On a related note, does anyone know why the linux version was so much slower than the windows version of Star 5.2? That was the only thing that kept me from using linux in college. I had an ancient laptop, and it would take several minutes to load star office in linux, but in windows, it was no slower than my old copy of office 95.
Low latency DRAM doesn't sell computers to the average person, MB's do. If it cant be put in bold on the ad or spec sheet, lower the cost (AOL/MSN software), or is required for operation it probably isn't going in the computer. If you don't like that you will have to build it your self, or look for an OEM that charges a significant premium to sell to the much smaller geek market.
What I find humorous is that at Walmart (haven't checked K-Mart, Target, or Shopko) is that sugre protectors in electronics might cost 12-15 for a cheap one, but if you wander over to hardware you can find nicer ones for less.
From the study guides I've browsed, it would seem that either A+ or some of the MCSE tests would help to separate the race horses from the turtles. There are several companies that offer this service, exams online is only the first I saw. here is a whole list of good study guides.
You are quite accurate. A true shortage only occurs when regulation or some similar non market force changes output. An excellent example would be the gasoline shortage in the 70s. It only occured because of price ceilings placed on the price of gas. No ceilings no shortage, less would be sold at the higher price, but there wouldn't be a shortage.
This is just markets responding to stimulii. First everyone wanted to invest in telecommunications, debt and equity markets were happy to loan and invest in anything related to telecommunications. Now noone wants to invest in telecom at all. Soon the extra investment will be used, as demand increases and the price increases, and as prise increases, investment will return. Markets are pretty effective at things like this. What created the problem was the flood of investment following the removal of regulation on the industry. Not to say that the regulation was good, but that it being there slowly built up an imbalance and the removeal of the impediment to balanced markets caused such rapid movement that it created an imbalance in the other direction.
That sounds sort of like how I read. I generally don't read all of a word, just the first and last few letters and put the sentance together by context. It makes it really hard to read outloud, because my eyes skip lines, and I make the sentance sort of sound write, and my spelling and grammer are pretty poor, because I never read enough to pick it up. However I read at around 500 wpm unless it is quite technical or uses extremely rare words.
Nothing agiast the fine staff here, since it adds to the mistque, but does anyone else find it ironic that someone is criticising bad writing on slashdot?
I hope that I don't offend any of the people who were raised in the city, but I can usually tell the farmer's kids from everyone else. Farmers kids can fix just about anything, it may not work well when they are done, but it works, and they are willing to try, even when they don't know how it works prior to starting.
Some friends and I decided this attitude arises from being sent out to do a job, and expected to finish it without help or supervision by the end of the day.
I think that most of the tech divide exists because most users don't have any idea what a computer can do, giving them little incentive to learn more about it. I think this comes from the rapid change in the industry. Contrast this with cars, where almost everyone knows how a car should look, sound, and what features they should have. When they notice that one doesn't function properly, they know that something is wrong, and take action. With computers, most people, are happy when it doesn't crash and swallow their data. So they have no idea what additional things it could do.
I do think that something has to change, it still amazes me that recently at work, I got asked to make a blank table in excel. All it took was formatting a few columns and adding a title row.
Tthere was an article on the extremely high occurance of Lou Gehrig's disease in a US News from a few months ago, but nothing more than speculation as to what caused it.
What i find ironic is that I recall a BSA article in which someone there decried calling copyright violators pirates, because it brought up romantic swashbuckling images.
While the US has much higher disparities between rich and poor, Brazil is much higher. I think its close to the top.
One of the most common wealth disparity figures is the gini coeficcient, it measures the difference between a country's Lorenz line (a line plotting wealth percentile to population percentile) verses an ideal 45 degree line. European contries tend to have the lowest numbers, the US is near the middle, and South American countries are generally the highest.
In Brazil's case the richest 20% of the country holds almost 70% of the wealth.
While liquid nitrogen is sexy, almost any coolant in a refrigeration system will keep almost any system cool very effectivly, and save quite a bit on not needing special insulation, and atmospheric needs associated with cooling. Of course if you live in the north right now you could just stick the thing outside, its supposed to be quite cold for the rest of the week.
Its not the isp, thats just one of the sparring areas. The next major competitve area will be integrated platforms for web services, if my understanding of their strategy is correct. Just about everyone is trying to get their platform accepted, so they can monopolize the future. Thats most of the reason behind the X-Box and.Net. As best I can tell the main competitors are AOL, IBM, SUN, Oracle, Microsoft, and Nokia. Each brings its own strenths and weaknesses, and it will be interesting to see who starts stabbing others in the back as we get closer to crunch time.
Also Oracle is there because the earth isn't big enough for either Larry or Bill's ego, let alone both.
I think its because its not on the default front page (which all the lurkers and people who don't change their settings see), rather you have at least ask slashdot as one of the topics that always appears on the front page. If that is what it is, than it's the editors decision, and there have been quite a few articles on microsoft's anti-trust case in the past few days, and quite a few lawsuit related stories today.
All it has to be is more than 15 months and you save money. Even assuming an 5% interest rate on your loan to them, which is what a pre-paid subscription is, it would only take 16 months for you to come out ahead. This looks to me like TiVo is hurting for cash, and can raise quite a bit quickly. Just using your estimate you would save almost $600 if the subscription lasted 5 years. Which isn't a bad return at all.
I will heartily second that, especially at lower levels. I finished two years of engineering, before switching to busineess graduated and really enjoy my job. It is really nice to understand the simple math that goes into financial formula's, its mostly basic stuff, like a sum, first year calculus or similar, but so few of my peers have any understanding of this, it makes my little bit of extra quite useful. That being said, my advice would be to do what you will enjoy, otherwise no amount of money or job security will compensate you for missing out on doing what you love.
I think the difference lies in the newness of CS as a discipline. The difference between a coder and a software engineer, for lack of a better term than good software author, seems to me to be similar to the difference between an engineer and a technician. Both are very smart and very important to a good result, but their functions are quite different. It is more complicated, especially by the people who are good at both. The engineer creates the design for the problem, while the technician takes a design and fabricates it, which requres a different set of skills.
Coders are like the technicians, but good software generally requres another to layout the major design and form of it, before all the code is written. Of course this should be taken with a grain of salt since I am barely competent enough to write a hello world program.
While I cannot begin to comprehend your individual situation here are some of the lessons I have learned in my rather limited experiences. First of all, remember that what you see your manager doing is not all that he does. One of the best flinstones episodes is the one where Fred has a dream that he becomes Mr. Slate for the day and realizes that the boss doesn't have it easier. While it doesn't seem like he cares, he probably has his boss breathing down his neck to cut costs and increase output.
Next, it is important to realize that good managment is one of the most difficult things to do. Especially in technology, where a balance between technical knowledge, and people skills are both crucial to getting the job done. Most people are good at one or the other but not both. While niether of these tips can make your bosses better, they might make you feel better about it. Additionally, technical people are generally very sure of their own correctness, which turns off most non-technical people.
On a final note, it might pay to learn a little psycology. Next time you are at the bookstore, look at some of the titles that cover relationships. These can be very useful, whether or not they are specifically written for business relationships. A good one will help you recognise how to better communicate with your manager, understand why they do what they do, and might even improve your relationship with wife/significant other (which certainly makes all of your life more rewarding. Hope some of the tips help.
Slashdot Mirror
While I can certainly see the value of an open office area for teamwork, the idea of shared phones baffles me. I can't imagine having to share phones, even if they are not used often.
I used to run office 2000 with no problems on a Pentium 166 with 64 megs of ram at one job I had. Sometimes access queries took a minute or two but everything else was quite snappy. On a related note, does anyone know why the linux version was so much slower than the windows version of Star 5.2? That was the only thing that kept me from using linux in college. I had an ancient laptop, and it would take several minutes to load star office in linux, but in windows, it was no slower than my old copy of office 95.
Low latency DRAM doesn't sell computers to the average person, MB's do. If it cant be put in bold on the ad or spec sheet, lower the cost (AOL/MSN software), or is required for operation it probably isn't going in the computer. If you don't like that you will have to build it your self, or look for an OEM that charges a significant premium to sell to the much smaller geek market.
thats cause it is contracted out to Solectron.
What I find humorous is that at Walmart (haven't checked K-Mart, Target, or Shopko) is that sugre protectors in electronics might cost 12-15 for a cheap one, but if you wander over to hardware you can find nicer ones for less.
Cool, I'm the tick> SPOOOOOOOOOOOONNNN!
I had problems at a lan party that was finally traced to my monitor cable running too close to several power cables.
From the study guides I've browsed, it would seem that either A+ or some of the MCSE tests would help to separate the race horses from the turtles. There are several companies that offer this service, exams online is only the first I saw. here is a whole list of good study guides.
You are quite accurate. A true shortage only occurs when regulation or some similar non market force changes output. An excellent example would be the gasoline shortage in the 70s. It only occured because of price ceilings placed on the price of gas. No ceilings no shortage, less would be sold at the higher price, but there wouldn't be a shortage. This is just markets responding to stimulii. First everyone wanted to invest in telecommunications, debt and equity markets were happy to loan and invest in anything related to telecommunications. Now noone wants to invest in telecom at all. Soon the extra investment will be used, as demand increases and the price increases, and as prise increases, investment will return. Markets are pretty effective at things like this. What created the problem was the flood of investment following the removal of regulation on the industry. Not to say that the regulation was good, but that it being there slowly built up an imbalance and the removeal of the impediment to balanced markets caused such rapid movement that it created an imbalance in the other direction.
That sounds sort of like how I read. I generally don't read all of a word, just the first and last few letters and put the sentance together by context. It makes it really hard to read outloud, because my eyes skip lines, and I make the sentance sort of sound write, and my spelling and grammer are pretty poor, because I never read enough to pick it up. However I read at around 500 wpm unless it is quite technical or uses extremely rare words.
Nothing agiast the fine staff here, since it adds to the mistque, but does anyone else find it ironic that someone is criticising bad writing on slashdot?
I hope that I don't offend any of the people who were raised in the city, but I can usually tell the farmer's kids from everyone else. Farmers kids can fix just about anything, it may not work well when they are done, but it works, and they are willing to try, even when they don't know how it works prior to starting.
Some friends and I decided this attitude arises from being sent out to do a job, and expected to finish it without help or supervision by the end of the day.
I think that most of the tech divide exists because most users don't have any idea what a computer can do, giving them little incentive to learn more about it. I think this comes from the rapid change in the industry. Contrast this with cars, where almost everyone knows how a car should look, sound, and what features they should have. When they notice that one doesn't function properly, they know that something is wrong, and take action. With computers, most people, are happy when it doesn't crash and swallow their data. So they have no idea what additional things it could do.
I do think that something has to change, it still amazes me that recently at work, I got asked to make a blank table in excel. All it took was formatting a few columns and adding a title row.
Tthere was an article on the extremely high occurance of Lou Gehrig's disease in a US News from a few months ago, but nothing more than speculation as to what caused it.
Great, I'm color blind. Try explaining to your boss why you just formatted the brown sever when you were supposed to do the green one.
Size matters not, mmm!
What i find ironic is that I recall a BSA article in which someone there decried calling copyright violators pirates, because it brought up romantic swashbuckling images.
While the US has much higher disparities between rich and poor, Brazil is much higher. I think its close to the top.
One of the most common wealth disparity figures is the gini coeficcient, it measures the difference between a country's Lorenz line (a line plotting wealth percentile to population percentile) verses an ideal 45 degree line. European contries tend to have the lowest numbers, the US is near the middle, and South American countries are generally the highest. In Brazil's case the richest 20% of the country holds almost 70% of the wealth.
While liquid nitrogen is sexy, almost any coolant in a refrigeration system will keep almost any system cool very effectivly, and save quite a bit on not needing special insulation, and atmospheric needs associated with cooling.
Of course if you live in the north right now you could just stick the thing outside, its supposed to be quite cold for the rest of the week.
Its not the isp, thats just one of the sparring areas. The next major competitve area will be integrated platforms for web services, if my understanding of their strategy is correct. Just about everyone is trying to get their platform accepted, so they can monopolize the future. Thats most of the reason behind the X-Box and .Net. As best I can tell the main competitors are AOL, IBM, SUN, Oracle, Microsoft, and Nokia. Each brings its own strenths and weaknesses, and it will be interesting to see who starts stabbing others in the back as we get closer to crunch time.
Also Oracle is there because the earth isn't big enough for either Larry or Bill's ego, let alone both.
I think its because its not on the default front page (which all the lurkers and people who don't change their settings see), rather you have at least ask slashdot as one of the topics that always appears on the front page. If that is what it is, than it's the editors decision, and there have been quite a few articles on microsoft's anti-trust case in the past few days, and quite a few lawsuit related stories today.
All it has to be is more than 15 months and you save money. Even assuming an 5% interest rate on your loan to them, which is what a pre-paid subscription is, it would only take 16 months for you to come out ahead. This looks to me like TiVo is hurting for cash, and can raise quite a bit quickly. Just using your estimate you would save almost $600 if the subscription lasted 5 years. Which isn't a bad return at all.
Yeah, I make software but I only listen to music.
I will heartily second that, especially at lower levels. I finished two years of engineering, before switching to busineess graduated and really enjoy my job. It is really nice to understand the simple math that goes into financial formula's, its mostly basic stuff, like a sum, first year calculus or similar, but so few of my peers have any understanding of this, it makes my little bit of extra quite useful. That being said, my advice would be to do what you will enjoy, otherwise no amount of money or job security will compensate you for missing out on doing what you love.
I think the difference lies in the newness of CS as a discipline. The difference between a coder and a software engineer, for lack of a better term than good software author, seems to me to be similar to the difference between an engineer and a technician. Both are very smart and very important to a good result, but their functions are quite different. It is more complicated, especially by the people who are good at both. The engineer creates the design for the problem, while the technician takes a design and fabricates it, which requres a different set of skills. Coders are like the technicians, but good software generally requres another to layout the major design and form of it, before all the code is written. Of course this should be taken with a grain of salt since I am barely competent enough to write a hello world program.
While I cannot begin to comprehend your individual situation here are some of the lessons I have learned in my rather limited experiences.
First of all, remember that what you see your manager doing is not all that he does. One of the best flinstones episodes is the one where Fred has a dream that he becomes Mr. Slate for the day and realizes that the boss doesn't have it easier. While it doesn't seem like he cares, he probably has his boss breathing down his neck to cut costs and increase output.
Next, it is important to realize that good managment is one of the most difficult things to do. Especially in technology, where a balance between technical knowledge, and people skills are both crucial to getting the job done. Most people are good at one or the other but not both. While niether of these tips can make your bosses better, they might make you feel better about it. Additionally, technical people are generally very sure of their own correctness, which turns off most non-technical people.
On a final note, it might pay to learn a little psycology. Next time you are at the bookstore, look at some of the titles that cover relationships. These can be very useful, whether or not they are specifically written for business relationships. A good one will help you recognise how to better communicate with your manager, understand why they do what they do, and might even improve your relationship with wife/significant other (which certainly makes all of your life more rewarding. Hope some of the tips help.