The hackers are getting in through an optical admin/maintenance port on the meter. I doubt that the property owner was ever meant to use it. I too am shocked that it does not (appear to) have any authentication for a connection. I don't know how these meters phone home, but it must be fast enough to authenticate a user.
To start, I have worked with many people in IT career fields who don't have a technical degree, I don't think that will hold you up too much. If you have experience, make sure that is listed prominently on your resume. If you think your major is holding you back, then don't list it. Just list your BS degree. A company that is concerned about your major will call. That will give you another opportunity to highlight your experience. If a company is really hung-up on your major, move on, you probably don't want to work for them anyway.
This is the most practical advice. Creating objective measures of priority or importance is the best ways to manage individual tasks on a project. I try to quantify how many users are impacted, or how frequently an error happens relative to other. Mapping requirements at this level will help reveal the changes that provide the widest impact. Once scores are assigned, I put them in order, selecting some from the top, middle and lower third of the list. This makes sure that even your "low" priorities in the backlog get done, eventually.
I agree that requiring security is a good thing, but my (limited) understanding of this legislation is that it goes too far in mandating specific technologies. My fear is that the law and bureaucracy will not be able to keep up with the ever changing cybersecurity landscape. If you regulate too much, the industry is stuck maintaining an outdated infrastructure. If you regulate too little, the industry can get out of jail free by showing that they met the minimum requirements under the law.
I agree. A separate USB device to store all your device passwords in one spot is better. I would prefer this to having to keep each charger paired with a specific device. I keep one or two chargers on our kitchen counter, since our phones, eReaders, MP3 players, and most other devices all charge using the same micro or mini USB connector. Power adapters for new devices get tossed in a bin in the basement, usually never to be hear from again.
Something to consider is that a primary (and caucuses) require state wide coordination and resources. Polling places need to be opened, and votes need to be counted. The States need to provide the infrastructure for the parties to conduct their business. I guess you could start to push everything online, but state laws requiring a state issued photo ID are being struck down by the courts. How on Earth are you going to get everyone to a computer to vote? If it means anything, the state regulation ends at the ballot box. The rules that govern the nomination, and delegate selection are set by the parties.
Primaries are a function of the individual states. The state legislatures set the dates for their primaries. It not a function of the Federal government. The reason that Iowa and New Hampshire are first is that their state constitutions mandate that their primary (or Caucasus) must be held before any other state. The order in which states have their primaries has been a matter of national debate for the last several years, since the early states get a louder voice than the later states. Florida has recently challenged this by moving their primary up to January, putting the voting status of their delegates in jeopardy.
One reason that the national parties like Iowa and NH is that they are small states, and it is easier for the candidates to meet a high percentage of the state population. They also tend to be swing states that take their roles as primary leaders very seriously. Think of how much more money would need to be spent in California, or Texas. How meaningful would a win in California be for a Republican, or in Texas for a Democrat.
I am not saying that I love the current primary system, but I don't know how to get all 50 states to agree to a system. I suppose you could mandate the primary dates by attaching it to the Interstate highway funding bill (the same way we get our "national" drinking age of 21), but you would still need to get both houses to pass it, and that ain't happening any time soon.
Primaries are just polls. They are useful to the parties to determine the public tone of the upcoming election. Most likely the national GOP already knows who they are going to run, and they are using the primaries as a way to find the relevant messages they will focus on in 2012.
Primaries are more than just poles. They are governed by local and national rules to decide who will receive the nomination for the party for a particular office. This applies to town council all the way up to president of the US. They have a real and binding affect on the party. The delegates that are selected to go to the national convention are all pledged to a particular candidate, and while they can change their mind, they generally don't. Think of how the Electoral College runs.
If an employee came to me and said that he spent a little extra time over the weekend writing a script to improve our process, I would be inclined to toss him a little extra money. Should he expect to be compensated, perhaps. But it would be unmanageable if everyone starting doing this, especially without coordinating it in advance. In the case of the original poster, he implies that he spent weeks working on a major project, without his employer's knowledge, and now expects significant compensation for his time. It is not even clear to me that this work is wholly outside the scope of his work. This might not be spelled out in his job description, but he clearly has enough experience to know that there is a better way to do things. Is this not expected from someone who is described as a "senior" anything? I would be pretty upset as his manager.
I agree with you. The statement, "The application would streamline a lot of processes and take a lot of the burden off my team..." seems to imply the scripts he wrote are Germaine to his job. His "lots of downtime" comment implies that he does not have enough work to fill a day (although I will concede that he might mean that he is only working 40 hour, instead of 60 hour weeks). He is an experienced senior admin. Why shouldn't he be expected to fill in where needed, and suggest process improvements?
I think his mistake was not approaching his management first. Why not lay out the problem, and ask to divert some of his working hours to improving their processes? If he did it as a sanctioned project, he could pull his co-workers in to consult and improve the final product. To do all this work, then dangle it in front of your boss, demanding to be paid extra, just seems underhanded.
I liked his data showing that older scientists are still productive. What I did not see was his data showing that they are being pushed out in great numbers. Are companies truly pushing them out in greater numbers (as a percentage of population) or does it just seem that way because there are more people in the 40+ age bracket? This is all coming down to economics. What are senior scientists doing to justify the higher pay they usually demand? There is only so much room at the top of the org chart. As your career progresses you have to produce more/better work product. Your alternatives are to work for less, or be "flushed" out.
I disagree. I implemented this some time back on a financial application. We had the same problem where users didn't give us accurate information to find bugs, or fix their transactions. We decided that we would capture everything when an error was detected. User ID, transaction ID, time, error message, plus a few other fields were all recorded in a database. When the user called, we had several ways to find their error (I caught several users lying). We could also generate reports showing the frequency of an error, or category of errors. I agree that you can capture too much, but with some careful thought you can capture decent info to help augment the story from your user.
It is hard to prove a negative. If I blog that a company is polluting a local river, the company's only defense can be to ask for my evidence. How do you defend against secret evidence or sources?
You are confusing the priorities and responsibilities of the lawmakers in question. Recycling is generally handled at the municipal or county level. Healthcare is a state and national issue.
I wondered this myself. Do poor, or less educated parents, have a higher tendency to write the kids problem off as being "stupid", or "not good at [subject]". You might be able to test this by looking for kids where the diagnosis wasn't made at home, but through the intervention of a teacher, or the family physician.
I did not imply that there is a hard and fast rule. You always need to consider how your program will be used. What I do mean is that I think it is alright for a developer to use his head when deciding how to spend their time (with advice and consent of senior developers). If your program is using 4 GB of RAM, and virtualization, or concurrent processing is likely, then spending a day to reduce your memory food print is a good idea. On the other hand, if your app is down in the 200 kb range, then a significant time spent may not be worth.
Also, I am not advocating a "get out of jail free" card to developers, just because hardware is cheap. In the mobile arena it isn't. I am just saying look at the bigger picture. The programmer writing a banking system to process thousands of transactions per second is going to have a different perspective that the programmer writing a web application that searches song lyrics.
The bloat is coming from manufacturers that put a lot of unnecessary crap/features into their hardware/software. For example, the "phone home" feature, to get updates, or usage statistics. As a general rule, that is the stuff sucking up your system resources, not some developer's poor choice of a sorting algorithm. We shouldn't be wasteful with system resources, but as the original poster said, sometimes there is just no need, or time, to go through an optimization exercise to cut your memory footprint by small percent.
I agree. There is balance that needs to be struck here. If a developer is earning $40 to $50 per hour, is it worth it for him to spend more than 2 or 3 hours reducing the memory foot print of his application, by even 20%, when I can just slap an extra 4 gig in the server for about the same cost? Programmers do know how to optimize, in my example it is the use of their time.
I agree. When I hear friends and family talk about going off to college, they mostly discuss the campus life. I get silly look when I ask if they have compared the cost of their program against their expected salary. There are resources to find affordable schools. I feel that cheap Federal loans are artificially inflating tuition, allowing people to "afford" more because they have less of a down-payment.
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The hackers are getting in through an optical admin/maintenance port on the meter. I doubt that the property owner was ever meant to use it. I too am shocked that it does not (appear to) have any authentication for a connection. I don't know how these meters phone home, but it must be fast enough to authenticate a user.
To start, I have worked with many people in IT career fields who don't have a technical degree, I don't think that will hold you up too much. If you have experience, make sure that is listed prominently on your resume. If you think your major is holding you back, then don't list it. Just list your BS degree. A company that is concerned about your major will call. That will give you another opportunity to highlight your experience. If a company is really hung-up on your major, move on, you probably don't want to work for them anyway.
This is the most practical advice. Creating objective measures of priority or importance is the best ways to manage individual tasks on a project. I try to quantify how many users are impacted, or how frequently an error happens relative to other. Mapping requirements at this level will help reveal the changes that provide the widest impact. Once scores are assigned, I put them in order, selecting some from the top, middle and lower third of the list. This makes sure that even your "low" priorities in the backlog get done, eventually.
I agree that requiring security is a good thing, but my (limited) understanding of this legislation is that it goes too far in mandating specific technologies. My fear is that the law and bureaucracy will not be able to keep up with the ever changing cybersecurity landscape. If you regulate too much, the industry is stuck maintaining an outdated infrastructure. If you regulate too little, the industry can get out of jail free by showing that they met the minimum requirements under the law.
Ha! Age, birth year, its all the same, right? I bet in North Korea they could make your age remain constant :)
Nothing odd here. The ages of Chinese gymnasts change all the time.
"You asked for miracles, Theo, I give you the FBI."
- Hans Gruber (Die Hard)
Sorry, they are copyrighted. Mr. Ksanfomaliti will be happy to share them with you 2077.
I agree. A separate USB device to store all your device passwords in one spot is better. I would prefer this to having to keep each charger paired with a specific device. I keep one or two chargers on our kitchen counter, since our phones, eReaders, MP3 players, and most other devices all charge using the same micro or mini USB connector. Power adapters for new devices get tossed in a bin in the basement, usually never to be hear from again.
Something to consider is that a primary (and caucuses) require state wide coordination and resources. Polling places need to be opened, and votes need to be counted. The States need to provide the infrastructure for the parties to conduct their business. I guess you could start to push everything online, but state laws requiring a state issued photo ID are being struck down by the courts. How on Earth are you going to get everyone to a computer to vote? If it means anything, the state regulation ends at the ballot box. The rules that govern the nomination, and delegate selection are set by the parties.
Primaries are a function of the individual states. The state legislatures set the dates for their primaries. It not a function of the Federal government. The reason that Iowa and New Hampshire are first is that their state constitutions mandate that their primary (or Caucasus) must be held before any other state. The order in which states have their primaries has been a matter of national debate for the last several years, since the early states get a louder voice than the later states. Florida has recently challenged this by moving their primary up to January, putting the voting status of their delegates in jeopardy.
One reason that the national parties like Iowa and NH is that they are small states, and it is easier for the candidates to meet a high percentage of the state population. They also tend to be swing states that take their roles as primary leaders very seriously. Think of how much more money would need to be spent in California, or Texas. How meaningful would a win in California be for a Republican, or in Texas for a Democrat.
I am not saying that I love the current primary system, but I don't know how to get all 50 states to agree to a system. I suppose you could mandate the primary dates by attaching it to the Interstate highway funding bill (the same way we get our "national" drinking age of 21), but you would still need to get both houses to pass it, and that ain't happening any time soon.
Primaries are just polls. They are useful to the parties to determine the public tone of the upcoming election. Most likely the national GOP already knows who they are going to run, and they are using the primaries as a way to find the relevant messages they will focus on in 2012.
Primaries are more than just poles. They are governed by local and national rules to decide who will receive the nomination for the party for a particular office. This applies to town council all the way up to president of the US. They have a real and binding affect on the party. The delegates that are selected to go to the national convention are all pledged to a particular candidate, and while they can change their mind, they generally don't. Think of how the Electoral College runs.
If an employee came to me and said that he spent a little extra time over the weekend writing a script to improve our process, I would be inclined to toss him a little extra money. Should he expect to be compensated, perhaps. But it would be unmanageable if everyone starting doing this, especially without coordinating it in advance. In the case of the original poster, he implies that he spent weeks working on a major project, without his employer's knowledge, and now expects significant compensation for his time. It is not even clear to me that this work is wholly outside the scope of his work. This might not be spelled out in his job description, but he clearly has enough experience to know that there is a better way to do things. Is this not expected from someone who is described as a "senior" anything? I would be pretty upset as his manager.
I agree with you. The statement, "The application would streamline a lot of processes and take a lot of the burden off my team..." seems to imply the scripts he wrote are Germaine to his job. His "lots of downtime" comment implies that he does not have enough work to fill a day (although I will concede that he might mean that he is only working 40 hour, instead of 60 hour weeks). He is an experienced senior admin. Why shouldn't he be expected to fill in where needed, and suggest process improvements?
I think his mistake was not approaching his management first. Why not lay out the problem, and ask to divert some of his working hours to improving their processes? If he did it as a sanctioned project, he could pull his co-workers in to consult and improve the final product. To do all this work, then dangle it in front of your boss, demanding to be paid extra, just seems underhanded.
It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.
- Andrew Jackson
I liked his data showing that older scientists are still productive. What I did not see was his data showing that they are being pushed out in great numbers. Are companies truly pushing them out in greater numbers (as a percentage of population) or does it just seem that way because there are more people in the 40+ age bracket? This is all coming down to economics. What are senior scientists doing to justify the higher pay they usually demand? There is only so much room at the top of the org chart. As your career progresses you have to produce more/better work product. Your alternatives are to work for less, or be "flushed" out.
I disagree. I implemented this some time back on a financial application. We had the same problem where users didn't give us accurate information to find bugs, or fix their transactions. We decided that we would capture everything when an error was detected. User ID, transaction ID, time, error message, plus a few other fields were all recorded in a database. When the user called, we had several ways to find their error (I caught several users lying). We could also generate reports showing the frequency of an error, or category of errors. I agree that you can capture too much, but with some careful thought you can capture decent info to help augment the story from your user.
It is hard to prove a negative. If I blog that a company is polluting a local river, the company's only defense can be to ask for my evidence. How do you defend against secret evidence or sources?
You are confusing the priorities and responsibilities of the lawmakers in question. Recycling is generally handled at the municipal or county level. Healthcare is a state and national issue.
I wondered this myself. Do poor, or less educated parents, have a higher tendency to write the kids problem off as being "stupid", or "not good at [subject]". You might be able to test this by looking for kids where the diagnosis wasn't made at home, but through the intervention of a teacher, or the family physician.
I did not imply that there is a hard and fast rule. You always need to consider how your program will be used. What I do mean is that I think it is alright for a developer to use his head when deciding how to spend their time (with advice and consent of senior developers). If your program is using 4 GB of RAM, and virtualization, or concurrent processing is likely, then spending a day to reduce your memory food print is a good idea. On the other hand, if your app is down in the 200 kb range, then a significant time spent may not be worth.
Also, I am not advocating a "get out of jail free" card to developers, just because hardware is cheap. In the mobile arena it isn't. I am just saying look at the bigger picture. The programmer writing a banking system to process thousands of transactions per second is going to have a different perspective that the programmer writing a web application that searches song lyrics.
The bloat is coming from manufacturers that put a lot of unnecessary crap/features into their hardware/software. For example, the "phone home" feature, to get updates, or usage statistics. As a general rule, that is the stuff sucking up your system resources, not some developer's poor choice of a sorting algorithm. We shouldn't be wasteful with system resources, but as the original poster said, sometimes there is just no need, or time, to go through an optimization exercise to cut your memory footprint by small percent.
I agree. There is balance that needs to be struck here. If a developer is earning $40 to $50 per hour, is it worth it for him to spend more than 2 or 3 hours reducing the memory foot print of his application, by even 20%, when I can just slap an extra 4 gig in the server for about the same cost? Programmers do know how to optimize, in my example it is the use of their time.
It is a real pain when the bank rejects your checks dated Oct., 25 '02.
I agree. When I hear friends and family talk about going off to college, they mostly discuss the campus life. I get silly look when I ask if they have compared the cost of their program against their expected salary. There are resources to find affordable schools. I feel that cheap Federal loans are artificially inflating tuition, allowing people to "afford" more because they have less of a down-payment.