Really? My company does. A certain rather large, high-profile search engine company with a numerically-derived name uses it. I'm willing to bet you could find quite a list of customers on Oracle's pages.
Old Apple game designed to teach logic gates and the underlying principles of electronics. I loved that "game". I'd love to find an emulator and a copy of it.
Seriously, though, the reasons I find most IT departments tend to ignore the very rules they set for their users, is 1) because the IT personnel accept that if they screw something up, THEY will be the one that has to fix it; 2) they know what the heck they're doing; 2a) they understand the consequences and ramifications of changes they make to their systems.
I myself work in IT, so perhaps my opinion is biased; but I have never yet, in 12 years, had a bent rule or circumvented "security" device bite me in the ass. It comes down to acceptance of risk and understanding what you're doing.
I agree with the concept of "punishing" repeat offenders, but I doubt you'll get much support from department managers with your idea of issuing them a crappy machine. I would imagine you'd get more traction with department managers by informing them their employee has repeatedly subjected the company's sensitive data to risk, and should future incidents occur, this would be grounds for disciplinary action (up to and including termination). This of course depends on your company having established security policies - which are a pain in the neck to write, but worth it in the long run.
I've worked at companies where this has been effective, both for employees who were willfully irresponsible (repeatedly installing weatherbug, etc.), and those who were so unskilled as to be a complete nuisance to IT (calling every day with a question like "How do I print from Word again?").
"Managers" are not there to be technical resources, in most cases. They are there to keep the crap from rolling downhill onto you (except maybe when you really deserve it). To manage expectations from other departments/managers. To delegate tasks appropriate to his/her employees' skillsets, etc. If you're looking for a go-to guy, someone who you can learn from, whom you don't need to teach anything, you need a senior IT tech, probably in a 'team lead' position. A good team lead (or "technical lead") will be the liason between a highly technical team and a non-technical manager.
Come on, is 'drop shadows' really a feature worth mentioning? Seems to imply there's so little else to brag about; like how car manufacturers brag about 'rack and pinion steering'. Last I checked, the Model T had that, too.
I am a Palm application developer in my spare time. I use Palm Simulator to test my applications, so I don't frag my Tungsten C when I accidentally never return from an event loop, or what have you. I can do all of this development on Linux (by means of prc-tools) and the world is happy and full of flowers and singing birds and smiling squirrels. But to test my application, I have to be in Windows, which makes the smiling squirrels and singing birds run and be very sad.
Please, please, please, can I have Simulator on Linux? It doesn't run under Cedega or Crossover Office (though Cxoffice comes really close). To my knowledge I can't use an ARM ROM with POSE or Xpilot.
Please, think of the happy squirrels.
Sincerely, A Palm application developer that's sick of using Windows.
How did a headline like this make it onto Slashdot? I agree with the general tone of comments I've read so far - I think it's quite a stretch to call Google Desktop Search spyware just because it allows you to access other users' files on a PC running Windows. Many other routes could be taken to achieve this same goal.
It's always been my impression that "spyware" was software that was installed on your (typically Windows-based) PC, usually without your knowledge or consent, which then communicated some otherwise private information back to a vendor (be it a spammer, a software company, or what have you) for use in marketing or advertising, or maybe just because the vendor is abnormally nosy. This article doesn't say that GDS does anything of the kind.
Yeah, sure, someone could walk up to my laptop when I'm grabbing a soda down the hall, and do a quick search, but so what? They could do the same thing by clicking 'Search' on the Start menu. My fault for not locking my screen.
Except Science has already come out and concluded that there are no genetic distictions for race.
I find this hard to believe. I'm not a racist mind you, I just don't understand how there could *not* be some DNA marker that makes someone have dark brown skin, or almond-shaped eyes, just like there are genetic markers that make you have blonde hair or red hair or freckles or a big nose.
Are you saying then that there isn't a chunk of DNA that equals "asian" or "native american" or whatever? That what we perceive as a "race" is just a collection of physical traits (asians tend to have a specific eye shape, frequently have dark, straight hair, etc.)? If this is your statement, I agree with you, but if you're saying that DNA doesn't dictate what you look like, I'm very confused.
Pity I have to stick with sed, awk and shell scripts on our old HPUX servers though...
Why? I guess if you're using HPUX 8 or something you're out of luck, but gcc, apache, etc. - i.e. everything you need to make PHP go - is all available for any remotely recent HPUX version... see http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/ if you haven't before.
As long as you're working with National Instruments equipment, and doing things "the NI way", etc., I'm sure it's great. I have a friend who works for a prominent (in the LabView community) engineering firm, has experience in C, C++, Perl, Java, and a few other languages, and absolutely abhors LabView. Getting some of the simplest tasks accomplished in this "language", from what I have seen, is far from trivial and can actually take significantly longer for even a skilled LabView programmer to produce than a skilled programmer of a more "traditional" - i.e. text-based - language.
You even read the classifieds? Every page? And the stock ticker section of the business section?
You're one dedicated reader of an antiquated media format...
More on topic, I read the Economist every week or so (its delivery is somewhat erratic for some reason) - this is my primary source of world news; I find it rather less slanted than most other news magazines. Also I occasionally flip through Maxim, but I don't really read it (the subscription was a gift). It's got some funny stuff, and the girls are cute, but overall it's just fluff.
True enough that any relationship is a give and take, but the question also arises, what is the author of the article doing with someone who isn't comfortable with one of their (obviously major) hobbies? No, you shouldn't be spending 20hrs a day on a game, that's unhealthy on many levels, but neither should your SO be carping at you for a couple hours every few nights. Without more details about the situation, I can't tell which end of the spectrum this falls into, but it's been my experience that women by and large seem to take personal offense at the idea that their SO would have more fun playing a video game than spending it with them.
Job security in IT is a myth. We are all legos, that can be replaced by any one of a hundred people in India or Argentina or where ever they're offshoring to today, for half the wage. My supervisor is actually firmly against letting employees work from home, regardless of salary. I believe this is because he feels like he loses a measure of control if he can't see us.
In any case, if you think you have job security, think again.
Interesting, I can't seem to find any mention of IBM GS being "dumped" by Telestra on any of IBM's websites, internal or external. Has anyone found any other reliable sources to support this claim?
Perhaps it's just the time at which I got into the industry (1994), but I haven't had a day of college education and I've been pretty successful in the industry, as first a programmer and then a systems administrator. THe first company I worked for admittedly took a risk in hiring me - but then again, I was making barely more than minimum wage and was assigned the scut work in a Visual Basic project.:) However, once I proved myself to be a compentent programmer in other languages (C, Pascal [on an HP3000 - yes! Business used Pascal back then!]), they began assigning real work to me.
From that job, I moved on to more C programming positions; in each case I stressed the fact that while I was young (I started in the industry at age 15), I was dedicated to my choice of career and was a very quick study. I bore this claim out in my work ethic and was rewarded by advancing to positions which carried more and more responsibility, and garnered competitive salaries.
So, what worked for me was to study hard on my own to sharpen the skills I saw as marketable (luckily for me in the mid- to late-90s, that was any computer skill). Then, in interviews, I provided examples of my work for programming jobs, or asked for a project to give a solution to, in the case of sysadmin jobs. While the market is definitely tighter these days, a combination of hard work honing your skills on your own time, and proving yourself to be a dedicated, focused professional on your company's, will pay off.
As far as finding a good recruiter goes - in my experience, they're all pretty much the same; either they have a position for you or they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't work for Google or A9. I said my company, AS WELL AS a company with a numerically-derived name...
Nobody uses Oracle Corporate Time.
Really? My company does. A certain rather large, high-profile search engine company with a numerically-derived name uses it. I'm willing to bet you could find quite a list of customers on Oracle's pages.
Old Apple game designed to teach logic gates and the underlying principles of electronics. I loved that "game". I'd love to find an emulator and a copy of it.
Only ten chapters? I think the big problem with writing such a book would be convincing a publishing company to publish all ten VOLUMES.
Do you work for my company?
Seriously, though, the reasons I find most IT departments tend to ignore the very rules they set for their users, is 1) because the IT personnel accept that if they screw something up, THEY will be the one that has to fix it; 2) they know what the heck they're doing; 2a) they understand the consequences and ramifications of changes they make to their systems.
I myself work in IT, so perhaps my opinion is biased; but I have never yet, in 12 years, had a bent rule or circumvented "security" device bite me in the ass. It comes down to acceptance of risk and understanding what you're doing.
I agree with the concept of "punishing" repeat offenders, but I doubt you'll get much support from department managers with your idea of issuing them a crappy machine. I would imagine you'd get more traction with department managers by informing them their employee has repeatedly subjected the company's sensitive data to risk, and should future incidents occur, this would be grounds for disciplinary action (up to and including termination). This of course depends on your company having established security policies - which are a pain in the neck to write, but worth it in the long run.
I've worked at companies where this has been effective, both for employees who were willfully irresponsible (repeatedly installing weatherbug, etc.), and those who were so unskilled as to be a complete nuisance to IT (calling every day with a question like "How do I print from Word again?").
"Managers" are not there to be technical resources, in most cases. They are there to keep the crap from rolling downhill onto you (except maybe when you really deserve it). To manage expectations from other departments/managers. To delegate tasks appropriate to his/her employees' skillsets, etc. If you're looking for a go-to guy, someone who you can learn from, whom you don't need to teach anything, you need a senior IT tech, probably in a 'team lead' position. A good team lead (or "technical lead") will be the liason between a highly technical team and a non-technical manager.
Come on, is 'drop shadows' really a feature worth mentioning? Seems to imply there's so little else to brag about; like how car manufacturers brag about 'rack and pinion steering'. Last I checked, the Model T had that, too.
Dear Mr. Nice PalmSource Employee,
I am a Palm application developer in my spare time. I use Palm Simulator to test my applications, so I don't frag my Tungsten C when I accidentally never return from an event loop, or what have you. I can do all of this development on Linux (by means of prc-tools) and the world is happy and full of flowers and singing birds and smiling squirrels. But to test my application, I have to be in Windows, which makes the smiling squirrels and singing birds run and be very sad.
Please, please, please, can I have Simulator on Linux? It doesn't run under Cedega or Crossover Office (though Cxoffice comes really close). To my knowledge I can't use an ARM ROM with POSE or Xpilot.
Please, think of the happy squirrels.
Sincerely,
A Palm application developer that's sick of using Windows.
It's always been my impression that "spyware" was software that was installed on your (typically Windows-based) PC, usually without your knowledge or consent, which then communicated some otherwise private information back to a vendor (be it a spammer, a software company, or what have you) for use in marketing or advertising, or maybe just because the vendor is abnormally nosy. This article doesn't say that GDS does anything of the kind.
Yeah, sure, someone could walk up to my laptop when I'm grabbing a soda down the hall, and do a quick search, but so what? They could do the same thing by clicking 'Search' on the Start menu. My fault for not locking my screen.
You got off easy. I would have made you write 'I will not crash the server' on a blackboard, FFFF times.
In binary.
Capitalism works. QED.
I find this hard to believe. I'm not a racist mind you, I just don't understand how there could *not* be some DNA marker that makes someone have dark brown skin, or almond-shaped eyes, just like there are genetic markers that make you have blonde hair or red hair or freckles or a big nose.
Are you saying then that there isn't a chunk of DNA that equals "asian" or "native american" or whatever? That what we perceive as a "race" is just a collection of physical traits (asians tend to have a specific eye shape, frequently have dark, straight hair, etc.)? If this is your statement, I agree with you, but if you're saying that DNA doesn't dictate what you look like, I'm very confused.
Pity I have to stick with sed, awk and shell scripts on our old HPUX servers though...
Why? I guess if you're using HPUX 8 or something you're out of luck, but gcc, apache, etc. - i.e. everything you need to make PHP go - is all available for any remotely recent HPUX version... see http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/ if you haven't before.
As long as you're working with National Instruments equipment, and doing things "the NI way", etc., I'm sure it's great. I have a friend who works for a prominent (in the LabView community) engineering firm, has experience in C, C++, Perl, Java, and a few other languages, and absolutely abhors LabView. Getting some of the simplest tasks accomplished in this "language", from what I have seen, is far from trivial and can actually take significantly longer for even a skilled LabView programmer to produce than a skilled programmer of a more "traditional" - i.e. text-based - language.
You even read the classifieds? Every page? And the stock ticker section of the business section?
You're one dedicated reader of an antiquated media format...
More on topic, I read the Economist every week or so (its delivery is somewhat erratic for some reason) - this is my primary source of world news; I find it rather less slanted than most other news magazines. Also I occasionally flip through Maxim, but I don't really read it (the subscription was a gift). It's got some funny stuff, and the girls are cute, but overall it's just fluff.
True enough that any relationship is a give and take, but the question also arises, what is the author of the article doing with someone who isn't comfortable with one of their (obviously major) hobbies? No, you shouldn't be spending 20hrs a day on a game, that's unhealthy on many levels, but neither should your SO be carping at you for a couple hours every few nights. Without more details about the situation, I can't tell which end of the spectrum this falls into, but it's been my experience that women by and large seem to take personal offense at the idea that their SO would have more fun playing a video game than spending it with them.
My $0.02.
Job security in IT is a myth. We are all legos, that can be replaced by any one of a hundred people in India or Argentina or where ever they're offshoring to today, for half the wage. My supervisor is actually firmly against letting employees work from home, regardless of salary. I believe this is because he feels like he loses a measure of control if he can't see us.
In any case, if you think you have job security, think again.
Interesting, I can't seem to find any mention of IBM GS being "dumped" by Telestra on any of IBM's websites, internal or external. Has anyone found any other reliable sources to support this claim?
From that job, I moved on to more C programming positions; in each case I stressed the fact that while I was young (I started in the industry at age 15), I was dedicated to my choice of career and was a very quick study. I bore this claim out in my work ethic and was rewarded by advancing to positions which carried more and more responsibility, and garnered competitive salaries.
So, what worked for me was to study hard on my own to sharpen the skills I saw as marketable (luckily for me in the mid- to late-90s, that was any computer skill). Then, in interviews, I provided examples of my work for programming jobs, or asked for a project to give a solution to, in the case of sysadmin jobs. While the market is definitely tighter these days, a combination of hard work honing your skills on your own time, and proving yourself to be a dedicated, focused professional on your company's, will pay off.
As far as finding a good recruiter goes - in my experience, they're all pretty much the same; either they have a position for you or they don't.