And seriously,... the incident cost the company between $400,000 and $1 million in salaries, consultant expenses and other costs. ??? That's got to be the craziest application of 'cop math' I've seen in a non-drug related case ever.
Silly question, but assuming that the minuscule mass of objects in low Earth orbit still contribute to the Earth's overall mass with respect to the inertia and centripetal acceleration that keeps us in orbit around the sun. If we were to start ejecting tons of crap from LEO and sending it towards the sun, however minute the volume, couldn't we potentially alter the balance slightly and possibly even impact our orbit (duration / trajectory / stability) ?
I'm guessing no, but that assumes everything in moderation.
My mod points just ran out so I will just say it - that's the most informative and insightful thing I've read all week. As a professional software engineer with a masters degree in software engineering and twenty years of professional experience, the question literally offended me.
The sacrifices you made ten years ago, no matter how bad they sucked... they are behind you. The gains you made as a benefit of those sacrifices... they are with you today, and will be with you tomorrow.
I'd rather be me now, than have been the quarterback in high school. What most people would call the greatest day of their life, I call Wednesday.
Hackers write code. Professional software engineers deliver business solutions. For the beginning professional software engineers out there, here's a tip : comment your code (and comment it correctly.)
See also : IBM Model M keyboard. The number 1391403 sticks out in my mind for this one, but good luck finding that one in any quantity.
It's like the Tonka Truck of keyboards. Not easy to break, but easily used to break other things. You hit someone with a Model M keyboard and they are GOING DOWN.
Because the definition of "fluffing" that (I'm pretty sure) you're referring to isn't the one most of us are thinking of. Too bad. I love me a good fluffer.
Tourism. Legalize drugs, prostitution, and gambling up there and it would make Vegas's cashflow seem like kindergarten lunch money. See also : Freeside from Neuromancer.
I owned a very nice 1977 Corvette from 1991 until 2005 and it was a money-pit, if that answers your question. My mechanic had a key to my car hanging on a nail in his shop and every few weeks I would drop it off with a list of things to fix left on the dash. Couple of days later I would swing by after work to pick it up again, working (for a few more weeks, maybe a month or two if I was lucky.)
Damn I loved that car though. Never driven anything I loved as much as driving that old L-82.
Way low for H1-B. Figure three years at the 330,000 cap, and another three years at the 65,000 cap and I genuinely figure somewhere in the neighborhood of a cool million H1-B workers still here in the United States right now. Back of the envelope estimate, naturally. Half a million EASY.
I'm just starting my career in software development, and I'd like to get a great chair, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc
Odds are that if this your first gig as a professional software engineer (developer) you are fairly junior and working for a real company. If that's the case, you will get whatever they give you, augmented by whatever you can steal (aka - repurpose gear that you find unattended and unspoken for.) Be prepared - they will probably try to stick you with whatever the last guy left behind at the desk you inherit, and it will be crap.
a comfortable, ergonomic, efficient work environment
Since the ergonomics aspect of your question has been covered sufficiently above, I am going to suggest the the best productivity enhancer I have found yet : multiple high density monitors (1920x1080's, or 1920x1200's if you can get them). There is no substitute for screen real estate, esp when running code in the debugger while driving the application on a different screen.. You are going to find the most effective force multiplier comes with the second monitor attached to your existing machine, with a close follow-up by adding a second computer with two more monitors connected to the first one via Synergy so you control both via one mouse / keyboard combo. Simply move the mouse from one system to the other system and you are controlling the other system, with the ability to cut-n-paste between them. The second machine can be something very weak, you will relegate it to browsing the web (Googling API calls, etc, running the application you are working on (ie, end user testing), etc) - doesn't have to be a powerful workstation.
Note - you are going to encounter a LOT of push-back and resistance from whoever is buying when you order four full size monitors and two machines. Back in the day monitors cost $700 apiece and when someone who has been doing this more than a few years (ie your manager, other more experienced developers) see more than one they see 'crazy expensive', when the reality is that if you catch them on the cheap you can get four full size LCD's for less than a single monitor used to cost. Start with at least two, though, because the performance gains really are all you'd imagine and probably more.
Hmmm. Actually I think you may have hit upon the answer without realizing it. 'Borrow' the CPU cycles of computer labs that are closed at night. If you think about it, I am pretty sure there is at least one classroom exactly as you described (a few dozen mid-range to high end desktops on a GigE network) that locks the doors at night and spends a solid 10 hours dark. Figure out a way to boot these machines from a thumbdrive or boot DVD with the Linux distro for clusters that you like (personally I like the thumbdrive approach - it runs a LOT faster due to the seek times on a DVD ROM) and Voila! instant slave machine army for your cluster. If the OP can work around the hours constraints, I'm going to be he has access to a LOT more CPU horsepower than he could imagine.
The trick is simply finding out who is responsible for the hardware and convincing them to allow you access to the 'training room' or 'computer lab' after hours.
It's a VM running your favorite OS (SuSE Linux Server, Windows, whatever you want pretty much.). Log in with shell access (or RDesktop or however you like), upload your code as source and compile it on the target machine or just upload binaries and run them.
Cheapest charter non-Cessna-152 type flight (ie, capable of coast to coast) is about $4000 an hour. Granted you can bring quite a few people with you (what, maybe 6 or 8) but still crossing the country is still at least a five hour flight, moving into the $20,000 each way range, or $40,000 round trip.
If you're using Ubuntu go check out/dev/shm The OS allocates a chunk of memory for a ramdisk automagically, apparently dynamically allocating memory to it as you fill it with data.
I'm sure Google has more details if you're interested, now that you know it is there to look for. Here's something to get you started : Shared Memory.
Print them out. Put them in an envelope. Seal the envelope, and sign across where it is sealed. Let 'whoever' know where they are, and if the envelope is opened you want a damn good reason for it. If the envelope disappears or is compromised without a good reason, you know to change the passwords.
Two weapon limit is pretty much the only thing keeping me from dropping the cash to get this one. And I played D3D to death back when 486's walked the Earth.
I just installed 11.04 this evening. The reason/, has it in for Unity is : Unity sucks. If you don't already know where to find something, you will never find it. In my 20+ years of using computers I've never had a UI hide the details of getting shit done nearly as well as Unity. Sure thing - if all you want to do is open Firefox or an office suite nobody on this board has ever used - it is pretty damn slick. But want to do anything 'normal' besides that (or God forbid : advanced!) and unless you know exactly what you are looking for before you start, you are fucked. There is no breadcrumb trail. There is no drilling down. You are pretty much shit out of luck.
10.04 - my favorite now, and may be for a while it seems.
That's the bill rate the consulting firm I work for bills me out at. I don't take home nearly that much, nor do I have much say in the bill rate.
But the point I was making is - given that the gross cost of having a developer can be North of $1000 per-day, having so much as a half hour meeting between two people to discuss whether or not to give him a second monitor costs more that just keeping a spare monitor in the closet and saying help yourself.
It would be like having an entire thread to discuss whether or not the school should allow teachers to have a spare desk or two in the classroom so they would have room for a new kid to transfer in. Are the extra desks being used initially? Probably not. But as soon as the new desks do get populated (kids transfer from another class, or from a different school) all of a sudden the school is getting a free 5% productivity out of the teacher. If the desks hadn't been available to be populated, the school would have lost the opportunity for that additional capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "1337" hacker. Just sayin'.
And seriously, ... the incident cost the company between $400,000 and $1 million in salaries, consultant expenses and other costs. ???
That's got to be the craziest application of 'cop math' I've seen in a non-drug related case ever.
Silly question, but assuming that the minuscule mass of objects in low Earth orbit still contribute to the Earth's overall mass with respect to the inertia and centripetal acceleration that keeps us in orbit around the sun. If we were to start ejecting tons of crap from LEO and sending it towards the sun, however minute the volume, couldn't we potentially alter the balance slightly and possibly even impact our orbit (duration / trajectory / stability) ?
I'm guessing no, but that assumes everything in moderation.
It'd be a good place to listen to Rasta dub music, mon. Not to mention the occasional need to move stuff around Freeside.
My mod points just ran out so I will just say it - that's the most informative and insightful thing I've read all week.
As a professional software engineer with a masters degree in software engineering and twenty years of professional experience, the question literally offended me.
Quick, Easy, Make a lot of money. Pick two.
Agreed.
The sacrifices you made ten years ago, no matter how bad they sucked ... they are behind you. ... they are with you today, and will be with you tomorrow.
The gains you made as a benefit of those sacrifices
I'd rather be me now, than have been the quarterback in high school. What most people would call the greatest day of their life, I call Wednesday.
Get back to us when you kill an IBM Model M keyboard. It's like the Tonka Truck of keyboards. You hit someone with a Model M, they're going down.
Hackers write code. Professional software engineers deliver business solutions.
For the beginning professional software engineers out there, here's a tip : comment your code (and comment it correctly.)
Code tell you what.
Comments tell you why.
Honestly the biggest danger of touch screens isn't the RSI - it's crashing your car.
Don't ask how I know this.
See also : IBM Model M keyboard.
The number 1391403 sticks out in my mind for this one, but good luck finding that one in any quantity.
It's like the Tonka Truck of keyboards. Not easy to break, but easily used to break other things. You hit someone with a Model M keyboard and they are GOING DOWN.
It's ... centered around the player and it is clearly apparent that you are the only person of any importance.
So pretty much like reality.
Because the definition of "fluffing" that (I'm pretty sure) you're referring to isn't the one most of us are thinking of.
Too bad. I love me a good fluffer.
Tourism. Legalize drugs, prostitution, and gambling up there and it would make Vegas's cashflow seem like kindergarten lunch money.
See also : Freeside from Neuromancer.
I owned a very nice 1977 Corvette from 1991 until 2005 and it was a money-pit, if that answers your question.
My mechanic had a key to my car hanging on a nail in his shop and every few weeks I would drop it off with a list of things to fix left on the dash.
Couple of days later I would swing by after work to pick it up again, working (for a few more weeks, maybe a month or two if I was lucky.)
Damn I loved that car though. Never driven anything I loved as much as driving that old L-82.
Way low for H1-B.
Figure three years at the 330,000 cap, and another three years at the 65,000 cap and I genuinely figure somewhere in the neighborhood of a cool million H1-B workers still here in the United States right now. Back of the envelope estimate, naturally. Half a million EASY.
I'm just starting my career in software development, and I'd like to get a great chair, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc
Odds are that if this your first gig as a professional software engineer (developer) you are fairly junior and working for a real company. If that's the case, you will get whatever they give you, augmented by whatever you can steal (aka - repurpose gear that you find unattended and unspoken for.) Be prepared - they will probably try to stick you with whatever the last guy left behind at the desk you inherit, and it will be crap.
a comfortable, ergonomic, efficient work environment
Since the ergonomics aspect of your question has been covered sufficiently above, I am going to suggest the the best productivity enhancer I have found yet : multiple high density monitors (1920x1080's, or 1920x1200's if you can get them). There is no substitute for screen real estate, esp when running code in the debugger while driving the application on a different screen.. You are going to find the most effective force multiplier comes with the second monitor attached to your existing machine, with a close follow-up by adding a second computer with two more monitors connected to the first one via Synergy so you control both via one mouse / keyboard combo. Simply move the mouse from one system to the other system and you are controlling the other system, with the ability to cut-n-paste between them. The second machine can be something very weak, you will relegate it to browsing the web (Googling API calls, etc, running the application you are working on (ie, end user testing), etc) - doesn't have to be a powerful workstation.
Note - you are going to encounter a LOT of push-back and resistance from whoever is buying when you order four full size monitors and two machines. Back in the day monitors cost $700 apiece and when someone who has been doing this more than a few years (ie your manager, other more experienced developers) see more than one they see 'crazy expensive', when the reality is that if you catch them on the cheap you can get four full size LCD's for less than a single monitor used to cost. Start with at least two, though, because the performance gains really are all you'd imagine and probably more.
Hmmm. Actually I think you may have hit upon the answer without realizing it. 'Borrow' the CPU cycles of computer labs that are closed at night.
If you think about it, I am pretty sure there is at least one classroom exactly as you described (a few dozen mid-range to high end desktops on a GigE network) that locks the doors at night and spends a solid 10 hours dark. Figure out a way to boot these machines from a thumbdrive or boot DVD with the Linux distro for clusters that you like (personally I like the thumbdrive approach - it runs a LOT faster due to the seek times on a DVD ROM) and Voila! instant slave machine army for your cluster. If the OP can work around the hours constraints, I'm going to be he has access to a LOT more CPU horsepower than he could imagine.
The trick is simply finding out who is responsible for the hardware and convincing them to allow you access to the 'training room' or 'computer lab' after hours.
It's a VM running your favorite OS (SuSE Linux Server, Windows, whatever you want pretty much.). Log in with shell access (or RDesktop or however you like), upload your code as source and compile it on the target machine or just upload binaries and run them.
And Steve loves developers, developers, developers, developers.
Cheapest charter non-Cessna-152 type flight (ie, capable of coast to coast) is about $4000 an hour. Granted you can bring quite a few people with you (what, maybe 6 or 8) but still crossing the country is still at least a five hour flight, moving into the $20,000 each way range, or $40,000 round trip.
If you're using Ubuntu go check out /dev/shm
The OS allocates a chunk of memory for a ramdisk automagically, apparently dynamically allocating memory to it as you fill it with data.
I'm sure Google has more details if you're interested, now that you know it is there to look for. Here's something to get you started : Shared Memory.
Print them out.
Put them in an envelope.
Seal the envelope, and sign across where it is sealed.
Let 'whoever' know where they are, and if the envelope is opened you want a damn good reason for it.
If the envelope disappears or is compromised without a good reason, you know to change the passwords.
WebEx. Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Seriously - WebEx.
Two weapon limit is pretty much the only thing keeping me from dropping the cash to get this one. And I played D3D to death back when 486's walked the Earth.
I just installed 11.04 this evening. /, has it in for Unity is : Unity sucks. If you don't already know where to find something, you will never find it. In my 20+ years of using computers I've never had a UI hide the details of getting shit done nearly as well as Unity. Sure thing - if all you want to do is open Firefox or an office suite nobody on this board has ever used - it is pretty damn slick. But want to do anything 'normal' besides that (or God forbid : advanced!) and unless you know exactly what you are looking for before you start, you are fucked. There is no breadcrumb trail. There is no drilling down. You are pretty much shit out of luck.
The reason
10.04 - my favorite now, and may be for a while it seems.
That's the bill rate the consulting firm I work for bills me out at. I don't take home nearly that much, nor do I have much say in the bill rate.
But the point I was making is - given that the gross cost of having a developer can be North of $1000 per-day, having so much as a half hour meeting between two people to discuss whether or not to give him a second monitor costs more that just keeping a spare monitor in the closet and saying help yourself.
It would be like having an entire thread to discuss whether or not the school should allow teachers to have a spare desk or two in the classroom so they would have room for a new kid to transfer in. Are the extra desks being used initially? Probably not. But as soon as the new desks do get populated (kids transfer from another class, or from a different school) all of a sudden the school is getting a free 5% productivity out of the teacher. If the desks hadn't been available to be populated, the school would have lost the opportunity for that additional capacity.