The Twiddler is a great device - I got one when one of my hands totally went out due to RSI - but it's not really a good long-term replacement for day-to-day use as a keyboard IMHO. It's too slow (I got to about 30-40 WPM, whereas my normal typing speed is ~70-100), and actually requires quite a bit more movement to type than more ergonomic solutions. If you're building a wearable, it's probably the best single handheld keyboard out. But for RSI reduction, I dunno..
The stuff I've tried that's kept my hands from relapsing over the past 8 years:
Take breaks often. Stretch your hands. No 10-hour IRC/MUD/Zork runs without a 5-minute coffee break each hour.
Think about your hand position. Keep the keyboard out of the lap, etc.
Get a comfortable chair and organize your desk to where you're in a healthy position.
Get a wrist-rest if your keyboard doesn't have one.
Don't type so hard.
In addition, I used a Kinesis Keyboard for quite a while that seemed to help, and I love ErgoRests, although they help more with the shoulders and mouse-hand than with keyboard-related issues.
Oh, and don't ignore it. I let mine get bad enough the first time that it was painful to open doors, drive a car, or do any basic stuff for a couple of months and I still have two fingers that *always* tingle on their tips due to nerve damage. If you're so inclined, talk to a doctor! They didn't help me much at the time ("here's some steroids, oh those didn't help? Have you tried advil? We could do surgery, but it probably wouldn't work....") but there's been a lot more research on RSI-related problems since then. Mine actually wasn't Carpal Tunnel, but rather inflammation on the outside edge of the wrist (rather than the central tunnel) pushing on the nerves. Also got spiffy tendonitis to boot.
During the recovery phase, I'd also suggest getting two different types of wrist-braces. First, get a good pair of roller-blading wristpads. They don't make you look like quite as much of an invalid and they are much more comfy than the medical ones, but they do have a solid metal restraining bar that works wonders. Then, get the medical version with the hot/cold gel pack inserts. Use hot ones before working, and cold ones afterwards.
At the moment your alternative fields are also pretty hard-hit. Last year's graduating law-school classes at many of the top 10 schools had horrible placement rates. Entry-level hiring as a whole is Down as well.
Reasons range from over-hiring during the boom and cuts during the recession to the boost in the unemployed pool caused by scandals like Enron. There were a few firms who even revoked the offers they made to graduating lawyers - dropping them on their butts late enough in the game to almost ensure they remained unemployed for a while. That's a rather unheard-of event in the legal profession, as reputations are everything - it'll kill those firms' chances of hiring the top lawyers out of law school for years to come. Not pleasant. I know people that graduated high up in their classes from top law schools last year that are shoveling snow and mowing lawns for a living right now. Jobs are starting to come through, but typically they aren't anywhere near what one would have expected three years ago.
Accounting hasn't seemed much better - the major scandals dumped a lot of experienced accountants on the streets, and some of the biggest firms collapsed hard. There's also a smaller number of startups to pick up individual accountants. And business? You talked to any VC recently?
It's rough out there right now. But I agree with your primary recommendation - do what you think you'll love doing. Hell, it probably isn't a bad idea to extend the college-time a bit trying out different fields to find that love until the economy picks up - if one is optimistic that it will. I think it's starting to, if we can try to avoid starting any more long quagmire-style wars and get our government spending in check before things really go south we might have a chance.
The job postings are pretty much useless, and they never replied to my requests for my $29 back. I got scammed.
Haven't pursued it yet - it was a couple of months ago, and I've had other priorities. But I'm considering taking legal action if they don't respond when I get around to sending a paper letter.
3. PCs are far too general purpose. They're designed to do everything, but nothing really well.
General purpose PC's allow people to have one computer to do computer things. This allows developers to create new ideas - for existing hardware! It's a really neat trick, and pretty much the only reason that software development has taken off like it has. It's kinda like the concept of making general purpose things like, say, screws, gears, wheels, etc. Ya know, that industrial revolution thing. You got a circuit specifically built for posting on SlashDot?
2. Games drive things far too much. Why does every PC made since 1997 include AGP hardware?
Technology moves forward when people push the envelope and want more. Games use a wide range of diverse technologies, and are constantly at the edge because that's what seems to entertain the purchasers of the games the most. It's the "Ooooh! Aaaaah!" factor - keeping it means outdoing the last each time. That drive to do more and outdo what's been done is what makes science and technology change. It's the reason we're not still sharpening sticks. I'm kinda glad we've got that drive.
AGP being on every motherboard probably has something to do with AGP becoming what's called a standard. Standards are kinda cool - they let multiple companies make things that work together. You seem to be arguing that there should be no internet - but rather only a copper wire stretched between any two points of communication, where the protocol is unique to each. Otherwise, ya know, it's general purpose and not all the bandwidth is always used.
1. CPU power consumption keeps increasing at a dramatic rate, even though the vast majority of PCs are underutilized by ~80%.
Where are you getting that 80% statistic? Do you mean "When a person isn't running anything, the processor isn't getting used"? Duh. If I never used but 20% of my processor, why do some operations take measureable time? Maybe because I'm *using* the full processor... hmmm... that means - if I have a faster processor, I wait less time for results.
I remember when generating an RSA key took several minutes, and compiling a moderately large piece of software could take a day or two. I'm pretty happy to have technology that makes both doable within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee. Sure, I'd love for them to be instantaneous, but that'd take using something like 1000% of my 2.1GHz processor. It's almost doable with distributed or grid computing with enough back end resources, but then running most of that grid software requires a general purpose PC, 'cause it's kinda new technology...
4. Processor speed, memory requirements, they've all gotten very soft and meaningless.
I'll agree with that to some degree - but it's because there are so many factors that contribute to what a 'requirement' is and there's a finite time to test before shipping a product. Say you have a program with an embedded web browser.... How much RAM does it need? Well, maybe 10MB... Wait - what if the browser goes to a page with a 5MB bitmap on it? And at the same time, a Java VM starts up? What if the user can open multiple windows - as many as she wants until memory runs out? Most companies set requirements based on the minimum levels that feel 'responsive' under slightly averse conditions across a finite set of hardware. It isn't going to be a hard number, because different people use software different ways, and there are a *lot* of hardware configurations out there.
Similarly, people blindly advocate 1GB over 512MB without any real reason.
1GB = 512MB * 2. Twice as much means you can run twice as many programs or use software that requires twice as much memory. I've used quite a bit more than 1GB of RAM before, and it's a lot faster reading from RAM than swapping to disk and back, test it out sometime:) Even if you're blind, you can still hear the hard drive chugging....
No, I'm not a Luddite or environmental wacko.
Maybe not, but I sure hope it's a troll that just got poorly moderated.
Who marked this one up to a 5? It's almost as bad as the bloody article....
Thank you! I knew I had seen it before in a game - I had mistakenly thought it was Gathering but didn't see it used, so I did a Google search and found a million others:)
Kinda funny, Phantom registered "Built by Gamers, for Gamers" - there's a "tm" at the end of the
product sheet on their site. Apparently, it actually is registered, too.
Hell, it's even used to refer to [H]ard|OCP's own RatPadz.
A poster above suggested a new section on Slashdot for lawsuits... I think that's a great idea. SCO's newsworthy lawsuits may be dying out finally, but Phantom might keep the section viable for a year by itself. Especially if that "Pre-Order" link starts working and consumers get suckered as well as investors, or if they decide to defend their *cough* "Intellectual Property" *cough* by suing half the gaming industry for trademark infringement.
Wonder if that's where they hope to make a profit?
Check out EnhancedVision.com,
they've got some pretty cutting-edge equipement.
I put together a magnifier and color compression utility for Windows that might be useful, but it's experimental rather than a production app - unless he has color deficiencies (e.g. the blue-colorblindness associated with diabetes) then you'll do better with the built-in magnifier in windows or other software available on the internet.
I've thought about making a simple application using a standard web camera and blowing up the image from it to full screen.. Right now there are a lot of proprietary systems out there for doing such though that might be useful.
This just means that they are essentially forcing a 'non-executeable' flag on the stack, right? Or are they doing something more complex? Non-executeable stacks have been available for Linux, Solaris, and others for quite some time... It's cool if support for such is implemented in a chip, but is it really a silver bullet?
Still looking for hard tech on what exactly they're doing - I honestly don't know. However, if you could control one heap variable and overflow a stack-based buffer, would setting the stack to return into the heap variable and execute code inserted there still work? Seems like it might - a much harder-to-find situation than just a single unchecked stack buffer, but definitely not unheard of.
Now I always EXTEND... my job by delivering not so good stuff and therefore they always need me to fix it. Also I always orgaqnize meetings to resolve issues and force people to stay in meetings even if they don't need to. I say the opposite of course, but I always ask them to participate and let them know *how important they are* to define things. The result is always poor, documents are reviewed endlessly and my job is so secure now...
And people wonder why they get outsourced...
Sadly, I've seen lots of people take that attitude. It's pretty much the standard in many government and larger corporate settings. I remember an PC tech at an insurance company that used to hide in a network closet all day after turning on his computer and leaving his jacket on the chair. That's one of the reasons I only work for smaller companies.
People who take no pride in their work disgust me.
Re:Why why why
on
Hack Your Car
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Ever done tech support? The people who tweak things without any clue what they are doing are the ones that might be dissuaded by the car company's warnings and removal of warranties, and those are the ones they don't want to hear from. The fact that there is the (albeit rather remote) possibility of causing a failure that could lead to injury by tweaking the values also demands that they not condone it - otherwise they'd be opening themselves up to our painfully litigious society in a big way.
"You *told* me I could tweak it, and now my car's dead because I overheated the engine and warped it! It's cost me a week of work, plus the car, plus my suffering having to walk..." being the least of the lawsuit woes.
I'm sure they could care less if you hose your own car by screwing with it - as long as you don't come back to them whining about it and costing them time and money with warranty repairs they otherwise wouldn't have to do. They already did the research for those values - they had to to ship a solidly working car. If I had to solve complex multivariable minimization problems to get my bloody car started after dropping a wad of money for it, I'd buy one from someone else instead!
Cars are not part of what I do for a living or a hobby - I don't want to have to tweak them at every step. I just want it to work. Kinda like non-geeks using a computer....
A six-pack of beer to drink while you're formatting, partitioning, and configuring, and installing all your software on the laptop.
Always takes the better part of a day for me to get a new machine exactly as I like it. I need to just burn a DVD or two with ghost images one of these days....
Every company I've worked at seems to have their own standards idea of what testing software is. What a "Software Tester" does can be anything from following a written 'script' and pushing buttons in the product to writing test harnesses for unit testing, building the configuration management and build machines, and building automated tests to first check to see if each feature works - then make sure it stays working once it does.
What you'll need depends on what the corporate culture is for QA there and how much initiative and experience you're bringing to the table. Several people have suggested good books on testing and breaking software already, so just a few things I'd recommend on the practical...
If you're taking the programmer angle, take a look at "Building Secure Software" by Viega and McGraw. If the product runs on Windows, I'd also suggest "Debugging Applications for.NET and Windows" by Jon Robbins.
Whether you code or not, I'd also recommend GUI Bloopers by Johnson - there's a lot more to testing software than just finding where it crashes, and GUI issues are one place where problems are often swept under the rug. Look for inconsistencies in how the software responds to the user, and point those out to developers.
Use revision control software like CVS and keep any scripts and automation projects you do in there - they can be almost as important as the product's code. Also make sure there's a way to track bug histories available - I've walked into some shops that did it all purely by email and word of mouth, which is a great way to ship forgotten bugs. Bugzilla and Mantis are the two I've used.
Remember that the developers and management should strongly appreciate it when you find problems with the software, but more often than not they'll be behind schedule and a bit bitchy when you do your job well and find issues with their code - it's part of being in testing. They'll likely want to brush off things they find 'minor' entirely near ship date - you can keep those marked as low priority, but get them into the bug tracker!
Try to learn how to let people know there's a problem w/o being abrasive, and if you're working with a good team you'll likely find the developers are happy to help you out if you need anything to make your process smoother. Don't be afraid to ask for features that make testing easier.
And probably most importantly - when you do find a problem, make sure you know *exactly* how to repeat it or do your best to find out and let the developers know. That can mean the difference between a 5-minute fix by a developer and a few days of developer time before a fix. There are a couple of QA guys I've worked with that I wish I could drag with me whenever I switch products/companies simply because of how detailed their bug reports are.
From the speed of the RentaCoder site, I'd say a lot of unemployed slashdotters want to be 'outsourced programmers' too....
I looked too... I'm not sure which is worse though - the fact that the prices on the projects are beneath a living wage for me to consider bothering with them (I'd make more as a barista or a dishwasher), or that half of them seem to be helping some dishonest schmuck in a CS class cheat on his assignment so there will be more clueless dorks that can't program their way out of a paper bag holding CS degrees out there applying for jobs.
I'm cool with competing with Indians - for the most part the Indian coders I've met worked their asses off and knew their stuff, even if they might be willing to do it for half the price I'm used to commanding. If I was in their shoes, I suspect I'd do the same. Feeding your family is a good thing....
It's all the people that fill their resumes with keywords for technologies they don't understand and couldn't use if their lives depended on it that clutter up the application inboxes that annoy me. HR departments encourage that behaviour, as do hiring managers that can't tell the difference, but it still pisses me off - both when I end up having to interview such cluebags and show them to the door, and when I'm competing with them for a job.
Last time I went to the negotiating table when starting a new job, I fought for (and won) a number of changes to the IP agreements - but I had a strong position for negotiating as I was already consulting on the project and had proven my experience and value to them.
What state are you in? If you're in California, state law trumps those sorts of contracts to some degree - see California Labor Code 2870.
Also, on every contract I've ever been presented with, the was a section for exempted works - depending on the type of company you run you may simply be able to exempt the entire subject area of that company and be fine.
A lawyer will know what's applicable to your state - consulting one wouldn't be a bad idea as many people recommend. However, it's not always necessary if you know what you want and can negotiate well. You can look up your state's labor and intellectual property statutes online. Negotiation is typically give and take though - you may have to trade some things to get what you want.
In my case, negotiations took almost a month but I won 75% telecommute, ownership of all of the code I wrote on the side that was unrelated to the company's business, and the highest salary on the team (considerably more than the initial offer). I was asked to run any industry-related works (e.g. music) I wrote outside of work by upper management for approval before release - which I did, and they were very reasonable about it.
Of course, when the company came on hard times financially and brought in new management to reduce costs and get the VC's off their backs, that meant I was on the short list for downsizing - despite averaging 60+ hour weeks for over 2 years of service, receiving heavy praise on every review, and receiving pretty awards for the quality of my work.
Uhm - first off, I was referring to the Operating System bootstrap code on a PC. Typically the software I referred to is on the first sector of a floppy disk or on the MBR/Partition table sector of the hard disk. This is what people refer to as the 'boot sector' or bootstrap code when referring to writing an operating system.
It's under 512 bytes, which puts a considerable limit on its complexity (although you can use additional sectors if you wish to do more, provided you load them yourself with the first bit of code). You can go a long way towards debugging it by creating a.com file that's just under 32k and writing your code at the end (e.g. CS:0x7c00) and stepping through it with Debug.exe under DOS or in a command shell.
Writing an entire BIOS is harder and requires a more in-depth knowledge of the hardware, but has very little to do with writing the boostrap code for an operating system. Installing an OS typically doesn't require burning new 'proms - you would always have the BIOS available to you when writing an OS for a PC in any situation I can think of.
Actually, depending on what you are looking to get out of the experience and how determined you are, it's a *very* small piece of code that you can learn quite a bit about the PC by writing.
If you're writing a toy OS to learn the upper level OS concepts, then you're probably better off writing your 'OS' as an app that runs on top of your favorite existing OS. But if you're doing it to learn more about low level programming and the hardware/firmware you're running on, the bootloader is at least a portion you can get done before loosing interest, and it teaches its own lessons.
Also, if all you want is a baby utility OS/program, you can bootstrap the entire program into memory from a floppy (or bootable CD) bootsector, run it, and be done with it.
Lessons learned:
Assembler language
BIOS interrupts
BIOS memory architecture
Disk structure and I/O
How a PC boots
How to get lilo back quickly and easily if you install XP onto a partition after linux.
Why you should backup your partition table and MBR sector before writing a buggy program to it.
If you want to learn from a simpler operating system than Linux,
Dissecting DOS was an excellent book in its time.
Assuming you want to go bottom-up in designing the system and you're using a PC, the first things you'll need are a decent grip on x86 assembler and PC architecture. Then, you need to learn the BIOS interrupts/services, since that's about all that'll be available to you.
I'd think one of the first things you might want to write is a bootstrap routine.The Undocumented PC had a pretty good description of bootstrapping as I recall. Basically, the bootsector of the boot device (first sector on a floppy, the MBR/partition table on hard disk, etc.) gets loaded to 0:7c00 in real mode and gets executed - what you do from there is up to you. Some *really* old video games for PC's came as boot disks and did just that - in a sense, they provided their own simple operating systems.
After that, you'll get into the more fun stuff - filesystems, memory management, task switching, compilers, linkers and loaders, device drivers, etc. That's where you'll want to be reading your Tanenbaum book, a stack of others, and probably peeking at Linux and other open source operating systems to see how it's really done.
I may be off base, but for what you're wanting (although not the original poster) I'd think you could just burn an EEPROM with a custom program quite similar to the DOS TSR's you describe and stick it on just about any network card with an empty socket on it.
I'd think polling the screen for changes and providing a way to push keys would be about all the code you'd need on that level. If you want remote access over a network, you'd need to use the EEPROM for what it was meant for as well - to boot off a network - and add a bit of custom code to turn over control to a network host. That'd be a task, but not too bad.
Otherwise, it'd be a simple project to create a basic TTY interface to an RS232 port or somesuch within that space that would allow you to do BIOS manipulations - the bootstrap code off your cards gets run before you can enter the BIOS setup.
A long, long time ago I wrote a bootstrap program to do port-level I/O with IDE drives and burned it onto an EEPROM, stuck it in my 3C905 (or was it 3C509?). I used it to autodetect IDE drives on machines with BIOS's that didn't support autodetection. Worked like a charm.
This was back in the day of 386's, but I've noticed most network cards I buy still have that empty socket.... I suspect if you put something at a 0x2000 boundary with a valid bootstrap sig and checksum, it'd get run in pretty much the same manner.
My recommendation would be to first decide how you best learn. If you learn best in a classroom, go for it. Otherwise - you already have a graduate degree in your MD, so you don't really need a computer science degree as well to convince people you're educated. If MIT's OpenCourseWare works for you - by all means use it. There are also numerous excellent books on most aspects of computer science available - Knuth, Stevens, Richter, Petzold, Stroustrop and many other good authors made far better teachers for me than I ever found in a university.
The market is currently quite rough, especially to break into. After being laid off when a product tanked on the market, I've gone a few months without having a single resume responded to - and I have almost a decade of professional programming experience that was applicable to the jobs I've applied for (and my resume used to keep the phones ringing daily for months when I posted it - the market has changed a bit).
You have a very special situation though - you know, or can find out if you think about it and ask your colleagues, exactly what one fairly wealthy niche market needs. What software would help you - as a doctor - work more efficiently? What software have you and your colleagues found lacking? There's your first project:)
It won't be easy, and you won't make money fast. My recommendation would be to start learning about computers and computer programming now while thinking about products. As soon as you feel like you can design a useful program and have one in mind - take a shot at it.
Use CVS ( or for Windows, WinCVS ) or some other revision control so you can keep track of all the code you write (I wish I had when I started!). Estimate for yourself how long tasks should take - track those estimates, and figure out why they were right or wrong. Document everything, especially the code.
Once you have a product you think is worthy for your target audience - use it yourself in your work. Then let some colleagues try it out. Fix anything you find wrong with it, and ask your colleagues for suggestions.
Then, set up a website, advertise it, and try to sell it - or set up a project on SourceForge and make it open source - whichever you feel more comfortable with. On SourceForge, you'll be able to enlist the help of other more experienced programmers and together tailor the product towards excellence. If you sell it and it's successful, you'll be able to afford to switch careers to full-time programmer/entreprenuer and just work on your business.
That brings me to another point - if you aren't currently running your own doctor's office, start learning business skills too. They're just as hard to pick up as programming skills - possibly harder for some. Figure out what you'll need to do to start running your own software company. Even if you decide to write your own software as open source and become an employee for someone else professionally, this will help you at the negotiating table.
What I would NOT recommend is dropping out of medicine, getting a BS in computer science, and expect doors to be immediately open when you g
For quite a while I worked in semiconductor fabs around the world, doing maintainence and custom programming on wafer handling and inspection systems.
The bunny suits weren't a big deal, nor was typing with rubber gloves.
What sucked was that several of the fabs were operating before all of their safety mechanisms and gas alarms were operational. In the States, OSHA would have shut them down. In western Europe, there would have been a public outcry like you wouldn't believe. But in Asia....
I remember someone coming over the intercom once in Mandarin sounding a bit flustered, but I didn't catch what she said (my Chinese sucked). Then everyone started running for the door. I kinda looked around, and decided that I *really* didn't want to be the last one out. As I got near the exit, two guys were suiting up in Haz-Mat suits.
Apparently the gallium arsenide gas chamber was leaking on one of the machines in a big way. The place was shut down for 48 hours - something you don't see often out there.
Wasn't the first time, either. Also had random rashes that always seemed to correspond with stains of unknown origin on whatever bunny suit I was given that day... Oh - and being 6' tall in some of those places means you've got perma-wedgie in the suits made for 5' people.
Plenty of people have it worse (including the teenage factory workers in some of those places), but I was awfully happy to change industries later on...
Linux isn't the only thing that supports it right now though - most Windows software companies should be considering purchase of one of these, if they haven't already bought one for each developer.
Longhorn 64-bit has been available to anyone with an MSDN subscription for a while now, and the first to market apps with 64-bit versions of software will get a big boost in market share when Longhorn goes live.
It's interesting that you can circumvent old copy protections with impunity due to the list's entry on obsolete technologies. I'd assume DVD's would fall into that catagory soon after the "Next Big Thing" comes out.
Maybe a step towards getting copyrights knocked back down to 20 years? Seems like all personal computing technologies are obsoleted in 10 years or less these days.
If you read the article, or my post - neither was spam. It was a response to a previous spam - his email address and such were legit (i dug for them before sending my email) and not used for spam.
I believe one of his marketing execs hired an advertisement agency which sent out the spam.
after I was spammed about this device... here's his response to me. Might be interesting...
------------
Please let me explain a little about our web site and new product launch
campaign.
The web site should be very clear that we are looking for "dealers" to sign
up and sell our new product. The site explains who the customers are, and
the advantages of our new product.
I am an electrical designer by trade, however the main focus of my business
has been the sale and manufacture of firearms and accessories, of which we
sell to Law Enforcement, Military and others. The idea for the development
for this product came about from discussions I have had with our Law
enforcement customers. They provided an explanation that many vehicles in
there fleet are not equipped with traffic light preemption, because of the
cost. The market is now dominated by 3M Corp. and they sell this technology
for up to $5,000 per installation. I have applied my design back ground to
offer an affordable solution to this problem.
It took over 2 years of development and testing from outside labs to perfect
this product. A substantial investment, in the multiple 6 figures has been
expended. So now what do we do to "get the word out" we have several
challenges. one is that 3M has factory reps all over the country, and we
must establish our own rep network to promote our product. How can this be
done? My answer to this was to hire 12 advertising executives with a budget
of 100K per month to brand our name, to show our product, and to establish a
dealer network quickly to provide maximum market coverage. The first phase
was national branding, the second phase will be national TV news and talk
shows.
We have a unique product and we need to get the word out.
Now, your view of what my company is doing is to sell to the public, please
understand that every effort has been made to qualify what this product
does, who will benefit from it and to find individuals interested in selling
this item. I have chosen to do this in a bold way, which includes internet
exposure to people in the trade (i.e. EMS, Law Enforcement, etc) and also to
individuals that are interested in a unique business opportunity.
When something gets advertised on the internet it seems it looses
credibility, I understand this and am working hard to redesign the site to
overcome this problem.
Back to who we sell to and who we do not sell to.
We require a legal agreement signed by a dealer, no one else in this
industry requires this, after that we qualify the dealer to make sure we
want them to represent this product. We go far beyond what is asked of us to
qualify the dealer and NO individuals are allowed to buy this product for
there own use. You and I both understand that this is not an option. We will
not sell to individuals, even though there is no law preventing a company
from doing so. We are trying to launch a truly revolutionary product, much
different that what has been on the market for over 25 years. I feel great
about this product having designed it myself and understand that it is truly
a win solution for all involved. I can feel good knowing that my product
will save lives, in two ways, one is that it will secure an intersection
making it safer(plenty of stats available on this point from Federal ITC
division) and two that it will allow first responders to get to where they
need to be earlier than without this technology. For example, a heart attack
victim has a diminishing chance of survival for every minute lost in
response time.
I'm sorry to make this so lengthily, but I feel a strong need to communicate
these points to you, and if you would be kind enough provide me feed back as
to where I'm going wrong with my presentation, what, in your mind would
communicate this better?
To wrap up, my policy is simple, if a dealer or end user uses this device
improperly we will pursue immediate legal action, this cannot be allowed and
won't be.
Slashdot Mirror
The stuff I've tried that's kept my hands from relapsing over the past 8 years:
In addition, I used a Kinesis Keyboard for quite a while that seemed to help, and I love ErgoRests, although they help more with the shoulders and mouse-hand than with keyboard-related issues.
Oh, and don't ignore it. I let mine get bad enough the first time that it was painful to open doors, drive a car, or do any basic stuff for a couple of months and I still have two fingers that *always* tingle on their tips due to nerve damage. If you're so inclined, talk to a doctor! They didn't help me much at the time ("here's some steroids, oh those didn't help? Have you tried advil? We could do surgery, but it probably wouldn't work....") but there's been a lot more research on RSI-related problems since then. Mine actually wasn't Carpal Tunnel, but rather inflammation on the outside edge of the wrist (rather than the central tunnel) pushing on the nerves. Also got spiffy tendonitis to boot.
During the recovery phase, I'd also suggest getting two different types of wrist-braces. First, get a good pair of roller-blading wristpads. They don't make you look like quite as much of an invalid and they are much more comfy than the medical ones, but they do have a solid metal restraining bar that works wonders. Then, get the medical version with the hot/cold gel pack inserts. Use hot ones before working, and cold ones afterwards.
Reasons range from over-hiring during the boom and cuts during the recession to the boost in the unemployed pool caused by scandals like Enron. There were a few firms who even revoked the offers they made to graduating lawyers - dropping them on their butts late enough in the game to almost ensure they remained unemployed for a while. That's a rather unheard-of event in the legal profession, as reputations are everything - it'll kill those firms' chances of hiring the top lawyers out of law school for years to come. Not pleasant. I know people that graduated high up in their classes from top law schools last year that are shoveling snow and mowing lawns for a living right now. Jobs are starting to come through, but typically they aren't anywhere near what one would have expected three years ago.
Accounting hasn't seemed much better - the major scandals dumped a lot of experienced accountants on the streets, and some of the biggest firms collapsed hard. There's also a smaller number of startups to pick up individual accountants. And business? You talked to any VC recently?
It's rough out there right now. But I agree with your primary recommendation - do what you think you'll love doing. Hell, it probably isn't a bad idea to extend the college-time a bit trying out different fields to find that love until the economy picks up - if one is optimistic that it will. I think it's starting to, if we can try to avoid starting any more long quagmire-style wars and get our government spending in check before things really go south we might have a chance.
Haven't pursued it yet - it was a couple of months ago, and I've had other priorities. But I'm considering taking legal action if they don't respond when I get around to sending a paper letter.
General purpose PC's allow people to have one computer to do computer things. This allows developers to create new ideas - for existing hardware! It's a really neat trick, and pretty much the only reason that software development has taken off like it has. It's kinda like the concept of making general purpose things like, say, screws, gears, wheels, etc. Ya know, that industrial revolution thing. You got a circuit specifically built for posting on SlashDot?
Technology moves forward when people push the envelope and want more. Games use a wide range of diverse technologies, and are constantly at the edge because that's what seems to entertain the purchasers of the games the most. It's the "Ooooh! Aaaaah!" factor - keeping it means outdoing the last each time. That drive to do more and outdo what's been done is what makes science and technology change. It's the reason we're not still sharpening sticks. I'm kinda glad we've got that drive.AGP being on every motherboard probably has something to do with AGP becoming what's called a standard. Standards are kinda cool - they let multiple companies make things that work together. You seem to be arguing that there should be no internet - but rather only a copper wire stretched between any two points of communication, where the protocol is unique to each. Otherwise, ya know, it's general purpose and not all the bandwidth is always used.
Where are you getting that 80% statistic? Do you mean "When a person isn't running anything, the processor isn't getting used"? Duh. If I never used but 20% of my processor, why do some operations take measureable time? Maybe because I'm *using* the full processor... hmmm... that means - if I have a faster processor, I wait less time for results.
I remember when generating an RSA key took several minutes, and compiling a moderately large piece of software could take a day or two. I'm pretty happy to have technology that makes both doable within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee. Sure, I'd love for them to be instantaneous, but that'd take using something like 1000% of my 2.1GHz processor. It's almost doable with distributed or grid computing with enough back end resources, but then running most of that grid software requires a general purpose PC, 'cause it's kinda new technology...
I'll agree with that to some degree - but it's because there are so many factors that contribute to what a 'requirement' is and there's a finite time to test before shipping a product. Say you have a program with an embedded web browser.... How much RAM does it need? Well, maybe 10MB... Wait - what if the browser goes to a page with a 5MB bitmap on it? And at the same time, a Java VM starts up? What if the user can open multiple windows - as many as she wants until memory runs out? Most companies set requirements based on the minimum levels that feel 'responsive' under slightly averse conditions across a finite set of hardware. It isn't going to be a hard number, because different people use software different ways, and there are a *lot* of hardware configurations out there.
1GB = 512MB * 2. Twice as much means you can run twice as many programs or use software that requires twice as much memory. I've used quite a bit more than 1GB of RAM before, and it's a lot faster reading from RAM than swapping to disk and back, test it out sometime :) Even if you're blind, you can still hear the hard drive chugging....
Maybe not, but I sure hope it's a troll that just got poorly moderated.
Who marked this one up to a 5? It's almost as bad as the bloody article....
Or about 10 seconds, at my last apartment. Last time I rent a 'student' apartment in an aging building, let me tell you....
Thank you! I knew I had seen it before in a game - I had mistakenly thought it was Gathering but didn't see it used, so I did a Google search and found a million others :)
But, seems like that's a pretty common phrase in the industry and has been so for years....
Hell, it's even used to refer to [H]ard|OCP's own RatPadz.
A poster above suggested a new section on Slashdot for lawsuits... I think that's a great idea. SCO's newsworthy lawsuits may be dying out finally, but Phantom might keep the section viable for a year by itself. Especially if that "Pre-Order" link starts working and consumers get suckered as well as investors, or if they decide to defend their *cough* "Intellectual Property" *cough* by suing half the gaming industry for trademark infringement.
Wonder if that's where they hope to make a profit?
I put together a magnifier and color compression utility for Windows that might be useful, but it's experimental rather than a production app - unless he has color deficiencies (e.g. the blue-colorblindness associated with diabetes) then you'll do better with the built-in magnifier in windows or other software available on the internet.
I've thought about making a simple application using a standard web camera and blowing up the image from it to full screen.. Right now there are a lot of proprietary systems out there for doing such though that might be useful.
Still looking for hard tech on what exactly they're doing - I honestly don't know. However, if you could control one heap variable and overflow a stack-based buffer, would setting the stack to return into the heap variable and execute code inserted there still work? Seems like it might - a much harder-to-find situation than just a single unchecked stack buffer, but definitely not unheard of.
And people wonder why they get outsourced...
Sadly, I've seen lots of people take that attitude. It's pretty much the standard in many government and larger corporate settings. I remember an PC tech at an insurance company that used to hide in a network closet all day after turning on his computer and leaving his jacket on the chair. That's one of the reasons I only work for smaller companies.
People who take no pride in their work disgust me.
"You *told* me I could tweak it, and now my car's dead because I overheated the engine and warped it! It's cost me a week of work, plus the car, plus my suffering having to walk..." being the least of the lawsuit woes.
I'm sure they could care less if you hose your own car by screwing with it - as long as you don't come back to them whining about it and costing them time and money with warranty repairs they otherwise wouldn't have to do. They already did the research for those values - they had to to ship a solidly working car. If I had to solve complex multivariable minimization problems to get my bloody car started after dropping a wad of money for it, I'd buy one from someone else instead!
Cars are not part of what I do for a living or a hobby - I don't want to have to tweak them at every step. I just want it to work. Kinda like non-geeks using a computer....
Always takes the better part of a day for me to get a new machine exactly as I like it. I need to just burn a DVD or two with ghost images one of these days....
What you'll need depends on what the corporate culture is for QA there and how much initiative and experience you're bringing to the table. Several people have suggested good books on testing and breaking software already, so just a few things I'd recommend on the practical...
If you're taking the programmer angle, take a look at "Building Secure Software" by Viega and McGraw. If the product runs on Windows, I'd also suggest "Debugging Applications for .NET and Windows" by Jon Robbins.
Whether you code or not, I'd also recommend GUI Bloopers by Johnson - there's a lot more to testing software than just finding where it crashes, and GUI issues are one place where problems are often swept under the rug. Look for inconsistencies in how the software responds to the user, and point those out to developers.
Use revision control software like CVS and keep any scripts and automation projects you do in there - they can be almost as important as the product's code. Also make sure there's a way to track bug histories available - I've walked into some shops that did it all purely by email and word of mouth, which is a great way to ship forgotten bugs. Bugzilla and Mantis are the two I've used.
Remember that the developers and management should strongly appreciate it when you find problems with the software, but more often than not they'll be behind schedule and a bit bitchy when you do your job well and find issues with their code - it's part of being in testing. They'll likely want to brush off things they find 'minor' entirely near ship date - you can keep those marked as low priority, but get them into the bug tracker!
Try to learn how to let people know there's a problem w/o being abrasive, and if you're working with a good team you'll likely find the developers are happy to help you out if you need anything to make your process smoother. Don't be afraid to ask for features that make testing easier.
And probably most importantly - when you do find a problem, make sure you know *exactly* how to repeat it or do your best to find out and let the developers know. That can mean the difference between a 5-minute fix by a developer and a few days of developer time before a fix. There are a couple of QA guys I've worked with that I wish I could drag with me whenever I switch products/companies simply because of how detailed their bug reports are.
Just my $0.2...
I looked too... I'm not sure which is worse though - the fact that the prices on the projects are beneath a living wage for me to consider bothering with them (I'd make more as a barista or a dishwasher), or that half of them seem to be helping some dishonest schmuck in a CS class cheat on his assignment so there will be more clueless dorks that can't program their way out of a paper bag holding CS degrees out there applying for jobs.
I'm cool with competing with Indians - for the most part the Indian coders I've met worked their asses off and knew their stuff, even if they might be willing to do it for half the price I'm used to commanding. If I was in their shoes, I suspect I'd do the same. Feeding your family is a good thing....
It's all the people that fill their resumes with keywords for technologies they don't understand and couldn't use if their lives depended on it that clutter up the application inboxes that annoy me. HR departments encourage that behaviour, as do hiring managers that can't tell the difference, but it still pisses me off - both when I end up having to interview such cluebags and show them to the door, and when I'm competing with them for a job.
What state are you in? If you're in California, state law trumps those sorts of contracts to some degree - see California Labor Code 2870.
Also, on every contract I've ever been presented with, the was a section for exempted works - depending on the type of company you run you may simply be able to exempt the entire subject area of that company and be fine.
A lawyer will know what's applicable to your state - consulting one wouldn't be a bad idea as many people recommend. However, it's not always necessary if you know what you want and can negotiate well. You can look up your state's labor and intellectual property statutes online. Negotiation is typically give and take though - you may have to trade some things to get what you want.
In my case, negotiations took almost a month but I won 75% telecommute, ownership of all of the code I wrote on the side that was unrelated to the company's business, and the highest salary on the team (considerably more than the initial offer). I was asked to run any industry-related works (e.g. music) I wrote outside of work by upper management for approval before release - which I did, and they were very reasonable about it.
Of course, when the company came on hard times financially and brought in new management to reduce costs and get the VC's off their backs, that meant I was on the short list for downsizing - despite averaging 60+ hour weeks for over 2 years of service, receiving heavy praise on every review, and receiving pretty awards for the quality of my work.
Ah well... It was nice while it lasted.
Anyone need an old coder?
It's under 512 bytes, which puts a considerable limit on its complexity (although you can use additional sectors if you wish to do more, provided you load them yourself with the first bit of code). You can go a long way towards debugging it by creating a .com file that's just under 32k and writing your code at the end (e.g. CS:0x7c00) and stepping through it with Debug.exe under DOS or in a command shell.
Writing an entire BIOS is harder and requires a more in-depth knowledge of the hardware, but has very little to do with writing the boostrap code for an operating system. Installing an OS typically doesn't require burning new 'proms - you would always have the BIOS available to you when writing an OS for a PC in any situation I can think of.
If you're writing a toy OS to learn the upper level OS concepts, then you're probably better off writing your 'OS' as an app that runs on top of your favorite existing OS. But if you're doing it to learn more about low level programming and the hardware/firmware you're running on, the bootloader is at least a portion you can get done before loosing interest, and it teaches its own lessons.
Also, if all you want is a baby utility OS/program, you can bootstrap the entire program into memory from a floppy (or bootable CD) bootsector, run it, and be done with it.
Lessons learned:
Assuming you want to go bottom-up in designing the system and you're using a PC, the first things you'll need are a decent grip on x86 assembler and PC architecture. Then, you need to learn the BIOS interrupts/services, since that's about all that'll be available to you.
I'd think one of the first things you might want to write is a bootstrap routine.The Undocumented PC had a pretty good description of bootstrapping as I recall. Basically, the bootsector of the boot device (first sector on a floppy, the MBR/partition table on hard disk, etc.) gets loaded to 0:7c00 in real mode and gets executed - what you do from there is up to you. Some *really* old video games for PC's came as boot disks and did just that - in a sense, they provided their own simple operating systems.
After that, you'll get into the more fun stuff - filesystems, memory management, task switching, compilers, linkers and loaders, device drivers, etc. That's where you'll want to be reading your Tanenbaum book, a stack of others, and probably peeking at Linux and other open source operating systems to see how it's really done.
Good luck!
I'd think polling the screen for changes and providing a way to push keys would be about all the code you'd need on that level. If you want remote access over a network, you'd need to use the EEPROM for what it was meant for as well - to boot off a network - and add a bit of custom code to turn over control to a network host. That'd be a task, but not too bad.
Otherwise, it'd be a simple project to create a basic TTY interface to an RS232 port or somesuch within that space that would allow you to do BIOS manipulations - the bootstrap code off your cards gets run before you can enter the BIOS setup.
A long, long time ago I wrote a bootstrap program to do port-level I/O with IDE drives and burned it onto an EEPROM, stuck it in my 3C905 (or was it 3C509?). I used it to autodetect IDE drives on machines with BIOS's that didn't support autodetection. Worked like a charm.
This was back in the day of 386's, but I've noticed most network cards I buy still have that empty socket.... I suspect if you put something at a 0x2000 boundary with a valid bootstrap sig and checksum, it'd get run in pretty much the same manner.
The market is currently quite rough, especially to break into. After being laid off when a product tanked on the market, I've gone a few months without having a single resume responded to - and I have almost a decade of professional programming experience that was applicable to the jobs I've applied for (and my resume used to keep the phones ringing daily for months when I posted it - the market has changed a bit).
I've been spending the extra time continuing development on my personal code library and projects, writing open source code, and working on a few products that I expect there to be a market for when they're done. That's how I'd suggest breaking into the field as well.
You have a very special situation though - you know, or can find out if you think about it and ask your colleagues, exactly what one fairly wealthy niche market needs. What software would help you - as a doctor - work more efficiently? What software have you and your colleagues found lacking? There's your first project :)
It won't be easy, and you won't make money fast. My recommendation would be to start learning about computers and computer programming now while thinking about products. As soon as you feel like you can design a useful program and have one in mind - take a shot at it.
Use CVS ( or for Windows, WinCVS ) or some other revision control so you can keep track of all the code you write (I wish I had when I started!). Estimate for yourself how long tasks should take - track those estimates, and figure out why they were right or wrong. Document everything, especially the code.
Once you have a product you think is worthy for your target audience - use it yourself in your work. Then let some colleagues try it out. Fix anything you find wrong with it, and ask your colleagues for suggestions.
Then, set up a website, advertise it, and try to sell it - or set up a project on SourceForge and make it open source - whichever you feel more comfortable with. On SourceForge, you'll be able to enlist the help of other more experienced programmers and together tailor the product towards excellence. If you sell it and it's successful, you'll be able to afford to switch careers to full-time programmer/entreprenuer and just work on your business.
That brings me to another point - if you aren't currently running your own doctor's office, start learning business skills too. They're just as hard to pick up as programming skills - possibly harder for some. Figure out what you'll need to do to start running your own software company. Even if you decide to write your own software as open source and become an employee for someone else professionally, this will help you at the negotiating table.
What I would NOT recommend is dropping out of medicine, getting a BS in computer science, and expect doors to be immediately open when you g
The bunny suits weren't a big deal, nor was typing with rubber gloves.
What sucked was that several of the fabs were operating before all of their safety mechanisms and gas alarms were operational. In the States, OSHA would have shut them down. In western Europe, there would have been a public outcry like you wouldn't believe. But in Asia....
I remember someone coming over the intercom once in Mandarin sounding a bit flustered, but I didn't catch what she said (my Chinese sucked). Then everyone started running for the door. I kinda looked around, and decided that I *really* didn't want to be the last one out. As I got near the exit, two guys were suiting up in Haz-Mat suits.
Apparently the gallium arsenide gas chamber was leaking on one of the machines in a big way. The place was shut down for 48 hours - something you don't see often out there.
Wasn't the first time, either. Also had random rashes that always seemed to correspond with stains of unknown origin on whatever bunny suit I was given that day... Oh - and being 6' tall in some of those places means you've got perma-wedgie in the suits made for 5' people.
Plenty of people have it worse (including the teenage factory workers in some of those places), but I was awfully happy to change industries later on...
Linux isn't the only thing that supports it right now though - most Windows software companies should be considering purchase of one of these, if they haven't already bought one for each developer. Longhorn 64-bit has been available to anyone with an MSDN subscription for a while now, and the first to market apps with 64-bit versions of software will get a big boost in market share when Longhorn goes live.
Maybe a step towards getting copyrights knocked back down to 20 years? Seems like all personal computing technologies are obsoleted in 10 years or less these days.
I believe one of his marketing execs hired an advertisement agency which sent out the spam.
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Please let me explain a little about our web site and new product launch campaign.
The web site should be very clear that we are looking for "dealers" to sign up and sell our new product. The site explains who the customers are, and the advantages of our new product.
I am an electrical designer by trade, however the main focus of my business has been the sale and manufacture of firearms and accessories, of which we sell to Law Enforcement, Military and others. The idea for the development for this product came about from discussions I have had with our Law enforcement customers. They provided an explanation that many vehicles in there fleet are not equipped with traffic light preemption, because of the cost. The market is now dominated by 3M Corp. and they sell this technology for up to $5,000 per installation. I have applied my design back ground to offer an affordable solution to this problem.
It took over 2 years of development and testing from outside labs to perfect this product. A substantial investment, in the multiple 6 figures has been expended. So now what do we do to "get the word out" we have several challenges. one is that 3M has factory reps all over the country, and we must establish our own rep network to promote our product. How can this be done? My answer to this was to hire 12 advertising executives with a budget of 100K per month to brand our name, to show our product, and to establish a dealer network quickly to provide maximum market coverage. The first phase was national branding, the second phase will be national TV news and talk shows.
We have a unique product and we need to get the word out.
Now, your view of what my company is doing is to sell to the public, please understand that every effort has been made to qualify what this product does, who will benefit from it and to find individuals interested in selling this item. I have chosen to do this in a bold way, which includes internet exposure to people in the trade (i.e. EMS, Law Enforcement, etc) and also to individuals that are interested in a unique business opportunity.
When something gets advertised on the internet it seems it looses credibility, I understand this and am working hard to redesign the site to overcome this problem.
Back to who we sell to and who we do not sell to. We require a legal agreement signed by a dealer, no one else in this industry requires this, after that we qualify the dealer to make sure we want them to represent this product. We go far beyond what is asked of us to qualify the dealer and NO individuals are allowed to buy this product for there own use. You and I both understand that this is not an option. We will not sell to individuals, even though there is no law preventing a company from doing so. We are trying to launch a truly revolutionary product, much different that what has been on the market for over 25 years. I feel great about this product having designed it myself and understand that it is truly a win solution for all involved. I can feel good knowing that my product will save lives, in two ways, one is that it will secure an intersection making it safer(plenty of stats available on this point from Federal ITC division) and two that it will allow first responders to get to where they need to be earlier than without this technology. For example, a heart attack victim has a diminishing chance of survival for every minute lost in response time.
I'm sorry to make this so lengthily, but I feel a strong need to communicate these points to you, and if you would be kind enough provide me feed back as to where I'm going wrong with my presentation, what, in your mind would communicate this better?
To wrap up, my policy is simple, if a dealer or end user uses this device improperly we will pursue immediate legal action, this cannot be allowed and won't be.
Please respond as I would like your input.
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