Buy one brand of hardware, and one model of machine for everybody. Get all the same server model, all the same video card in every machine and the same network card in every machine. Personally I am a Dell fanboy, but only because I have been using them forever and am good at navigating their support site for drivers. This makes system maintenance and repairs very easy, no esoteric crap to worry about (one set of drivers, one system gold disk image to restore from, and one set of spare parts.)
Amen to the guy that said document EVERYTHING. I have seen some of the most freaky undocument hacks this side of the moon - every day was an adventure in discovery (I once saw an extension cord with the ends hacked off used as part of an ARCnet network, spliced to the coax on each side using electrical tape!)
Amen to the guy that said hire a guy that knows what he is doing to come in and set it up. Shadow him and every other breath you take should make the sound 'why' so you know what everything is when he is gone.
GigE is cheap enough for you to use now. Enjoy.
Get LCD monitors and good keyboards / mice. I cringe today watching a $60k / year employee hampered by a $3 keyboard and a old 15" CRT.
PowerQuest Drive Image Professional, or Ghost. I prefer PQDI, but I hear Ghost is good too.
Servers get at least three partitions : OS partition, Applications partition, and Data partition. Once you have a DriveImage of the OS and Apps partitions, you really only need current backups (daily) of the data.
I have no clue how you are going to back up 500G of data each night, but something tells me it isn't going to be by burning it to DVD.
Even if it is just a closet - put your servers in their own room with dedicated power lines and dedicated cooling. It is going to get loud in there, so plan on sitting elsewhere.
Resist the urge to buy one-off items because they are cheap. The $300 one-off computer that some kid built in his garage is going to cost you way more than the difference it would have cost going with a single standardized platform - over the life of the machine.
One person can maintain 300 machines if they are all exact clones of each other. If every machine is unique it would take you 5-6 people keeping the same network fully operational. At $65k apiece fully loaded salary that's a third of a million dollars more per year to support the same 300 machines. At four year turnover on computers, you are talking about an EXTRA $4,000 per computer to save $200 total on purchase price.
The first line of defense in computers is the users. All the firewalls in the world won't stop a (virus / worm / trojan) if your dumb-ass accountant double clicks on a file attachment he gets in email from his golfing buddy, titled I_Love_You.doc.vbs. Knowledge is power.
Build it and design it as if you were going to have 1000 users.
If you wouldn't have a network of 1000 users all using their first name as their user id, why do it at the onset with the original 15?
If you wouldn't let all 1000 users surf porn from work, why do it with the original 15?
Re:let me explain something about longhorn...
on
Longhorn Beta Begins
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Now why I want an OS named after a breed of cattle... I can't answer.
Maybe the guys writing it worship cows or something?
Re:Why will I want to upgrade?
on
Longhorn Beta Begins
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The SMP code in Windows 2000 code was written under the assumption (valid, back in 1999) that any SMP machine would have two physical discrete CPUs. The code in XP's kernel has been tweaked to work better with the HyperThreaded CPU's, tweaks that 2000 didn't get (I believe it has something to do with a no-op or a wait or something.)
If you have a HT capable computer, it is worth upgrading to XP.
The remote desktop functionality built into the desktop is pretty cool too, but not worth upgrading for unless you absolutely needed it or wanted it (for example if you had one of the new iPaq's with a 640x480 screen and TermServer, wanted to remote control the computer over wifi.)
Here's the trick - I wouldn't buy one pre-installed because I wanted it pre-installed... I would buy one pre-installed because it tells me that all the drivers I am going to need are available and some clown in Round Rock (or India) knows how to get them working if I can't.
I would still reinstall it myself, but at least if / when it gets interesting (your network card is totally unrecognized, click ok or cancel) I know I can call someone / check the OEM web site for drivers and FAQ's.
I have used both too, and have used about half a dozen flavors of SuSE over the past year too (9.0 Pro, 9.1 Pro, 9.2 Pro, 9.3 Pro LiveDVD (which I am in right this second), 9.3 Pro, 9.0 Enterprise Server) and although 9.3 is really good - you need a footnote that it uses a new Xwindows engine (like Xorg instead of XF86) and the latest kernel - and between being on the bleeding edge of both the GUI and kernel means a bunch of stuff isn't going to work out of the box (Sybase ASE 12.5 is proving to be a serious bitch to get working - I will recant this entire email if anybody can tell me how to get it working in either SuSE ES 9.0 or 9.3 Pro.)
The number isn't how many people don't have jobs. The number is how many people are receiving unemployment benefits, and after some number of weeks (26?) the unemployment check stops getting sent so that person doesn't count anymore.
The way it works, corporations could reduce headcount for 1% each month forever, putting 50% of the workforce out of work in about 4 years, and the unemployment rate would ride it out at a peachy 6%.
Amazing what happens when a company outsources their coding tasks to a group of people with no background nor frame of reference in the material being coded.
I hope they saved enough in outsourcing the development effort to cover the loss.
Note - I didn't name any countries, and I didn't single any group out. I am just saying that this is the sort of thing that happens when you don't have your seasoned in-house developers coding your apps.
Oh come on, anybody can make a typo. It isn't like she intentionally went on a quarter billion dollar buying binge - and come to think of it we are only talking about a $250M. She will get over it, and the company will probably make a tidy profit in the long term game. Personally I lean towards agreeing with the guy towards the top of the page suggesting it was simply a made up story to cover up some insider fraud - makes sense.
Now Nick Leeson, this guy is going to have a hard time living down his adventure in derivatives:
'Speculative trading in derivatives gained a great deal of notoriety in 1995 when Nick Leeson, a trader at Barings Bank, made poor and unauthorized investments in index futures. Through a combination of poor judgment on his part, lack of oversight by management, a naive regulatory environment and unfortunate outside events, Leeson incurred a 1.3 billion dollar loss that bankrupted the centuries old financial institution.'
It isn't every day you destroy a fundamental financial institution with a multi-century history.
I hate to say it but the AC is right - never, ever invite the government in because once they get their paws into the mix all they do is screw things up.
If we as a community did the right thing and killed spammers (yes, we know who they are - all the way back to the two immigration lawyers that spammed usenet) - not 'took them off the net', not 'harassed them', not 'made them uncomfortable' - but killed them as in 'putting real bullets through their real bodies and made them stop being alive' dead - the spam issue would have been a non-issue.
But we didn't. All we did was whine, and now we are living in a digital wasteland.
Oh yea, I haven't had any caffeine yet. My perspective may change in a little while, but until then charge up the plasma weapons and proceed with operation Spam-Slayer.
Get one of those cable locks with the dongle that goes into the 'lock hole' in the laptop and tell her that if she isn't actively transporting it between places, it is to be securely fastened to something too big to move. Library, friends's house, in the dorm, wherever - if she isn't carrying it somewhere it gets secured. She doesn't have to make it unstealable, just harder to steal than someone else's laptop. (That was the 'informative' part of this post.)
Keeping your stuff isn't about identifying the perp after the fact. It is about securing your stuff from theft in the first place. (That was the 'insightful' part of this post.)
And a little 'scared' goes a long way towards living a very healthy, secure life.
*I'm not going to say that sleeping with a loaded pistol under the pillow is for everybody, but it has always worked for me. Come to my house without calling first and rest assured that the hand you don't see (behind the door) has a pistol in it ready to shoot you through the door.
How long until someone dies because some programmer mixed the two up?
Actually if one of my programmers used that faggoty MiB, Mebibytes, GiB Gibibytes shit and I caught them it would take about 38 seconds for someone to die, because that's how long it would take for me to stab him in the fucking throat 17 times.
And since it is 1,048,576 vs 1,048,576 (etc.) it is actually 0% off, even at the EB level, because I will have killed the one loser bitch on my team that suggested otherwise./grin
The previous text was the original Microsoft DOS shell, an obscure command line interface dating back to the early 80's. Although it had a cult following it never really gained any traction in the business or home / personal computer world as it didn't run any of the Microsoft Office products, couldn't interact with their Windows networks, didn't support Active Directory or any other sort of authentication, and most importantly you couldn't play games on it.
Come to think of it, other than showing white characters on a black screen, it really didn't have any function.
Us old-timers aren't surprised that you didn't recognize it - it was actually more of a prototype than a real operating system.
Read my other post on the subject and you will see that I made an exception for guys like you (and like myself, although I did go and get my BS/CS under the Dept of Engineering, and am working on my MS/CS) - the crew once referred to as hackers.
You can go a long way in IT without learning much of what they teach in college, if some company gives you a chance, like the opportunity you got (getting in during the.COM boom.) Those days are over - currently the companies are wayyy too picky and I don't see someone with no formal education and no practical experience getting hired into a tech position. I'm not disagreeing with you, circa 1999 - but that was then, this is now.
Sounds like you got lucky, and it sounds like you are good. If I had to pick one, though, I would rather be lucky than good.
I read the header and thought I was going to be witty and original when I came in here proclaiming 'D'oh, I use Outlook to schedule my life - whatd'ja think?' but once again I find that I have had a good idea - not an original idea, but a good idea nonetheless.
To be fair, I run WSAD under SuSE Linux as my primary development environment so I assure you that it is entirely possible to run Linux and Pirated Software on the same machine.
The nice thing about running up the Jolly Roger is... all software becomes F/OSS software.
I don't know which is worse. That you are such a prick, or that you are right.
There honestly isn't a future in computer science for a home schooled person.
I did, a few days ago, suggest that if someone wanted more than anything in the world to get their break into tech they could go into some company and offer to document code (ie, write the in-code line level, proc level and file level documentation describing what each routine did) - for free for the first month if necessary. It will get you in the door, and you will learn more about 'software engineering' than a person has a right to know.
People every day start a new company doing the crap that nobody else wants to do - and trust me, NOBODY wants to document their code.
Actually his question list is a very good indicator of whether or not she will make an amazing software engineer. It is an indication of having an aptitude for software engineering. And vi vs. emacs is anything but silly - heck in my office using the wrong brace indent style will get you stabbed in the parking lot.
Other strong indicators: Does she own any dice that have more or less than six sides on them? Does she have a cloth bag full of dice, with a pull-string to keep the bag closed (Crown Royal, etc.) Can she walk past a VCR that is blinking 12:00 without fixing it? Does she remember your phone number but forget your name? At 9:00PM on a Friday night is she a)watching TV, b)outside, or c) on the computer?
You say 'she isn't into programming yet.'
If you are right, then she probably doesn't have what it takes to be an amazing SE. All it takes to be 'into programming' is a $200 used computer and some pirated software (os, compiler, used books.) I was sitting in front of the family TV with a C=64 hooked up to it for DAYS at a time, skipping meals and not seeing daylight just to spend time hacking on some code I got in BYTE magazine.
If I was going to recommend something for her, however, I would suggest she get Studio.NET or WebSphere Application Developer, get her hands on as much code as she can find, and simply re-type it in line by line and run it, see what it does. Not cut-and-paste, actually print the code out and re-type it line by line. Get a good base of example code to see what does what, why the computer does what it does, and all that jazz just to get a feel for how a computer 'thinks' and how she is going to talk to the computer. Eight hours a day, seven days a week for two months - Google the commands to see what all they do, and watch the code run in the debugger. Either she will realize she hates computers, or she will go on to be a pretty amazing software engineer.
Oh I didn't say he was going to be doing 'student-financial-aid' type work, I'm sure he will be doing the same hardcore type of 'real work' regular professionals at non-uni jobs do.
I just said that when he goes to interview with other companies in the future, the risk exists that regardless of how much he says otherwise, he may run into this sort of pre-judging from the interviewing people.
Working for a university is like kissing your sister. Technically and theoretically it 'counts' as experience but honestly nobody is going to give you credit for it.
Here's the trick - anybody who is somebody went to college and either worked at one of those 'student-work' jobs where they got to goof off for minimum wage, or knew someone who did... and when you say you 'work for the college' that's the first mental impression they get - and it is going to be a hard sell to overthrow that image. Well that or they remember the BOFH that worked the computer room and will project their resentment onto you (even if only subconsciously.)
\was rejected by the folks handing out the student-work jobs.
\\was poor as hell in college.
\\\still a little bitter about both.
Sound card on IRQ5, because nobody has two parallel printers. COM 1 and 3 on IRQ4, COM 2 and 4 on IRQ3. Don't ask me why. Orange and White, Orange, Green and White, Blue, Blue and White, Green, Brown and White, Brown. (Sing to the tune Mary Had A Little Lamb.) When the times comes, you will know why that is important (hint: network cabling.) The IDE hard drive closest to the motherboard on the cable is the slave, the one on the far end of the cable (or the only drive on the cable, if there is only one) is the master. Bitchslap anybody who says otherwise. The red line on the cable goes towards the power connector or towards the front of the case. Black wires together when putting the cable from the power supply to the motherboard. ARCnet isn't picky, you can use two coathangers (metal) to transmit signal as long as they don't touch. On the Intel vs. AMD - I don't care, just pick one and stick with it. nVidia video card are better simply because they all use the same drivers so upgrading doesn't require anything more than swapping the old card for the new one. It used to be cheaper to build your own, but that isn't the case anymore. Anybody that adds lights to the inside of the case, or a see-through panel or neon or anything like that is a pathetic loser and isn't worth your attention. Pay special attention when wiring the power supply to the switch on your new case. The wires aren't keyed and you can cause a wicked short if you don't get it right. Twist two wires together, use the iron to get the wires really hot, put the soldier on the hot wires. If the wires aren't hot enough to melt the solder then heat the wires hotter, don't use the iron to melt the solder. Don't eat the solder, not even a little. Static electricity kills hardware. Wear a grounding strap, spray the carpet with fabric softener. Enable the encryption on your wireless point. You can tell if a 9v battery has power by touching it to your tongue. Don't try this with anything plugged into the wall. Exotic cooling and overclocking are like hooker sex. Expensive, and you don't really get anything you wouldn't get anyways if you were patient and waited a few months, except maybe a fried PC / PeePee. If you have to choose between $200 worth of processor upgrade or $200 worth of additional memory, go with the memory. If you can't tell the difference between two systems / components / configurations without a stopwatch, they are equally fast. A 4.3% advantage isn't really faster. 300%, now THAT's faster.
If that worked they would do it with Bibles, and people steal those left and right. Not sure what they do with them once they steal it, though, cause they sure as hell aren't reading them.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you are starting from scratch :
Buy one brand of hardware, and one model of machine for everybody. Get all the same server model, all the same video card in every machine and the same network card in every machine. Personally I am a Dell fanboy, but only because I have been using them forever and am good at navigating their support site for drivers. This makes system maintenance and repairs very easy, no esoteric crap to worry about (one set of drivers, one system gold disk image to restore from, and one set of spare parts.)
Amen to the guy that said document EVERYTHING. I have seen some of the most freaky undocument hacks this side of the moon - every day was an adventure in discovery (I once saw an extension cord with the ends hacked off used as part of an ARCnet network, spliced to the coax on each side using electrical tape!)
Amen to the guy that said hire a guy that knows what he is doing to come in and set it up. Shadow him and every other breath you take should make the sound 'why' so you know what everything is when he is gone.
GigE is cheap enough for you to use now. Enjoy.
Get LCD monitors and good keyboards / mice. I cringe today watching a $60k / year employee hampered by a $3 keyboard and a old 15" CRT.
PowerQuest Drive Image Professional, or Ghost. I prefer PQDI, but I hear Ghost is good too.
Servers get at least three partitions : OS partition, Applications partition, and Data partition. Once you have a DriveImage of the OS and Apps partitions, you really only need current backups (daily) of the data.
I have no clue how you are going to back up 500G of data each night, but something tells me it isn't going to be by burning it to DVD.
Even if it is just a closet - put your servers in their own room with dedicated power lines and dedicated cooling. It is going to get loud in there, so plan on sitting elsewhere.
Resist the urge to buy one-off items because they are cheap. The $300 one-off computer that some kid built in his garage is going to cost you way more than the difference it would have cost going with a single standardized platform - over the life of the machine.
One person can maintain 300 machines if they are all exact clones of each other. If every machine is unique it would take you 5-6 people keeping the same network fully operational. At $65k apiece fully loaded salary that's a third of a million dollars more per year to support the same 300 machines. At four year turnover on computers, you are talking about an EXTRA $4,000 per computer to save $200 total on purchase price.
The first line of defense in computers is the users. All the firewalls in the world won't stop a (virus / worm / trojan) if your dumb-ass accountant double clicks on a file attachment he gets in email from his golfing buddy, titled I_Love_You.doc.vbs. Knowledge is power.
Build it and design it as if you were going to have 1000 users.
If you wouldn't have a network of 1000 users all using their first name as their user id, why do it at the onset with the original 15?
If you wouldn't let all 1000 users surf porn from work, why do it with the original 15?
Now why I want an OS named after a breed of cattle... I can't answer.
Maybe the guys writing it worship cows or something?
The SMP code in Windows 2000 code was written under the assumption (valid, back in 1999) that any SMP machine would have two physical discrete CPUs. The code in XP's kernel has been tweaked to work better with the HyperThreaded CPU's, tweaks that 2000 didn't get (I believe it has something to do with a no-op or a wait or something.)
If you have a HT capable computer, it is worth upgrading to XP.
The remote desktop functionality built into the desktop is pretty cool too, but not worth upgrading for unless you absolutely needed it or wanted it (for example if you had one of the new iPaq's with a 640x480 screen and TermServer, wanted to remote control the computer over wifi.)
Here's the trick - I wouldn't buy one pre-installed because I wanted it pre-installed ... I would buy one pre-installed because it tells me that all the drivers I am going to need are available and some clown in Round Rock (or India) knows how to get them working if I can't.
I would still reinstall it myself, but at least if / when it gets interesting (your network card is totally unrecognized, click ok or cancel) I know I can call someone / check the OEM web site for drivers and FAQ's.
I have used both too, and have used about half a dozen flavors of SuSE over the past year too (9.0 Pro, 9.1 Pro, 9.2 Pro, 9.3 Pro LiveDVD (which I am in right this second), 9.3 Pro, 9.0 Enterprise Server) and although 9.3 is really good - you need a footnote that it uses a new Xwindows engine (like Xorg instead of XF86) and the latest kernel - and between being on the bleeding edge of both the GUI and kernel means a bunch of stuff isn't going to work out of the box (Sybase ASE 12.5 is proving to be a serious bitch to get working - I will recant this entire email if anybody can tell me how to get it working in either SuSE ES 9.0 or 9.3 Pro.)
SuSE 9.3 Professional LiveDVD
Download it (that's a fast site, thanks Uncle Sam!)
Burn it to DVD.
Boot from DVD.
Experiment with SuSE 9.3 Pro
When you are done, reboot, pull out the DVD and your file system is un-modified.
What state is that, if you don't mind me asking.
The number isn't how many people don't have jobs.
The number is how many people are receiving unemployment benefits, and after some number of weeks (26?) the unemployment check stops getting sent so that person doesn't count anymore.
The way it works, corporations could reduce headcount for 1% each month forever, putting 50% of the workforce out of work in about 4 years, and the unemployment rate would ride it out at a peachy 6%.
IBM once had a sales rep who made a $20M mistake. He figured his job was up. He was told "Fire you? We just spent $20M on your education!"
Damn, that's the most insightful thing I have heard this year. That's a manager that has a pretty good grasp of the big picture.
Amazing what happens when a company outsources their coding tasks to a group of people with no background nor frame of reference in the material being coded.
I hope they saved enough in outsourcing the development effort to cover the loss.
Note - I didn't name any countries, and I didn't single any group out. I am just saying that this is the sort of thing that happens when you don't have your seasoned in-house developers coding your apps.
Oh come on, anybody can make a typo. It isn't like she intentionally went on a quarter billion dollar buying binge - and come to think of it we are only talking about a $250M. She will get over it, and the company will probably make a tidy profit in the long term game. Personally I lean towards agreeing with the guy towards the top of the page suggesting it was simply a made up story to cover up some insider fraud - makes sense.
:
Now Nick Leeson, this guy is going to have a hard time living down his adventure in derivatives
'Speculative trading in derivatives gained a great deal of notoriety in 1995 when Nick Leeson, a trader at Barings Bank, made poor and unauthorized investments in index futures. Through a combination of poor judgment on his part, lack of oversight by management, a naive regulatory environment and unfortunate outside events, Leeson incurred a 1.3 billion dollar loss that bankrupted the centuries old financial institution.'
It isn't every day you destroy a fundamental financial institution with a multi-century history.
I hate to say it but the AC is right - never, ever invite the government in because once they get their paws into the mix all they do is screw things up.
If we as a community did the right thing and killed spammers (yes, we know who they are - all the way back to the two immigration lawyers that spammed usenet) - not 'took them off the net', not 'harassed them', not 'made them uncomfortable' - but killed them as in 'putting real bullets through their real bodies and made them stop being alive' dead - the spam issue would have been a non-issue.
But we didn't. All we did was whine, and now we are living in a digital wasteland.
Oh yea, I haven't had any caffeine yet.
My perspective may change in a little while, but until then charge up the plasma weapons and proceed with operation Spam-Slayer.
It's no good to live scared.
Hah - that's funny.*
Get one of those cable locks with the dongle that goes into the 'lock hole' in the laptop and tell her that if she isn't actively transporting it between places, it is to be securely fastened to something too big to move. Library, friends's house, in the dorm, wherever - if she isn't carrying it somewhere it gets secured. She doesn't have to make it unstealable, just harder to steal than someone else's laptop. (That was the 'informative' part of this post.)
Keeping your stuff isn't about identifying the perp after the fact. It is about securing your stuff from theft in the first place. (That was the 'insightful' part of this post.)
And a little 'scared' goes a long way towards living a very healthy, secure life.
*I'm not going to say that sleeping with a loaded pistol under the pillow is for everybody, but it has always worked for me.
Come to my house without calling first and rest assured that the hand you don't see (behind the door) has a pistol in it ready to shoot you through the door.
How long until someone dies because some programmer mixed the two up?
/grin
Actually if one of my programmers used that faggoty MiB, Mebibytes, GiB Gibibytes shit and I caught them it would take about 38 seconds for someone to die, because that's how long it would take for me to stab him in the fucking throat 17 times.
And since it is 1,048,576 vs 1,048,576 (etc.) it is actually 0% off, even at the EB level, because I will have killed the one loser bitch on my team that suggested otherwise.
The previous text was the original Microsoft DOS shell, an obscure command line interface dating back to the early 80's. Although it had a cult following it never really gained any traction in the business or home / personal computer world as it didn't run any of the Microsoft Office products, couldn't interact with their Windows networks, didn't support Active Directory or any other sort of authentication, and most importantly you couldn't play games on it.
Come to think of it, other than showing white characters on a black screen, it really didn't have any function.
Us old-timers aren't surprised that you didn't recognize it - it was actually more of a prototype than a real operating system.
Read my other post on the subject and you will see that I made an exception for guys like you (and like myself, although I did go and get my BS/CS under the Dept of Engineering, and am working on my MS/CS) - the crew once referred to as hackers.
.COM boom.) Those days are over - currently the companies are wayyy too picky and I don't see someone with no formal education and no practical experience getting hired into a tech position. I'm not disagreeing with you, circa 1999 - but that was then, this is now.
You can go a long way in IT without learning much of what they teach in college, if some company gives you a chance, like the opportunity you got (getting in during the
Sounds like you got lucky, and it sounds like you are good. If I had to pick one, though, I would rather be lucky than good.
This whole thread is funny.
I read the header and thought I was going to be witty and original when I came in here proclaiming 'D'oh, I use Outlook to schedule my life - whatd'ja think?' but once again I find that I have had a good idea - not an original idea, but a good idea nonetheless.
To be fair, I run WSAD under SuSE Linux as my primary development environment so I assure you that it is entirely possible to run Linux and Pirated Software on the same machine.
... all software becomes F/OSS software.
The nice thing about running up the Jolly Roger is
I don't know which is worse.
That you are such a prick,
or that you are right.
There honestly isn't a future in computer science for a home schooled person.
I did, a few days ago, suggest that if someone wanted more than anything in the world to get their break into tech they could go into some company and offer to document code (ie, write the in-code line level, proc level and file level documentation describing what each routine did) - for free for the first month if necessary. It will get you in the door, and you will learn more about 'software engineering' than a person has a right to know.
People every day start a new company doing the crap that nobody else wants to do - and trust me, NOBODY wants to document their code.
Actually his question list is a very good indicator of whether or not she will make an amazing software engineer. It is an indication of having an aptitude for software engineering. And vi vs. emacs is anything but silly - heck in my office using the wrong brace indent style will get you stabbed in the parking lot.
:
Other strong indicators
Does she own any dice that have more or less than six sides on them? Does she have a cloth bag full of dice, with a pull-string to keep the bag closed (Crown Royal, etc.)
Can she walk past a VCR that is blinking 12:00 without fixing it?
Does she remember your phone number but forget your name?
At 9:00PM on a Friday night is she a)watching TV, b)outside, or c) on the computer?
You say 'she isn't into programming yet.'
If you are right, then she probably doesn't have what it takes to be an amazing SE. All it takes to be 'into programming' is a $200 used computer and some pirated software (os, compiler, used books.) I was sitting in front of the family TV with a C=64 hooked up to it for DAYS at a time, skipping meals and not seeing daylight just to spend time hacking on some code I got in BYTE magazine.
If I was going to recommend something for her, however, I would suggest she get Studio.NET or WebSphere Application Developer, get her hands on as much code as she can find, and simply re-type it in line by line and run it, see what it does. Not cut-and-paste, actually print the code out and re-type it line by line. Get a good base of example code to see what does what, why the computer does what it does, and all that jazz just to get a feel for how a computer 'thinks' and how she is going to talk to the computer. Eight hours a day, seven days a week for two months - Google the commands to see what all they do, and watch the code run in the debugger. Either she will realize she hates computers, or she will go on to be a pretty amazing software engineer.
Oh I didn't say he was going to be doing 'student-financial-aid' type work, I'm sure he will be doing the same hardcore type of 'real work' regular professionals at non-uni jobs do.
I just said that when he goes to interview with other companies in the future, the risk exists that regardless of how much he says otherwise, he may run into this sort of pre-judging from the interviewing people.
Working for a university is like kissing your sister. Technically and theoretically it 'counts' as experience but honestly nobody is going to give you credit for it.
... and when you say you 'work for the college' that's the first mental impression they get - and it is going to be a hard sell to overthrow that image. Well that or they remember the BOFH that worked the computer room and will project their resentment onto you (even if only subconsciously.)
Here's the trick - anybody who is somebody went to college and either worked at one of those 'student-work' jobs where they got to goof off for minimum wage, or knew someone who did
\was rejected by the folks handing out the student-work jobs.
\\was poor as hell in college.
\\\still a little bitter about both.
Sound card on IRQ5, because nobody has two parallel printers.
COM 1 and 3 on IRQ4,
COM 2 and 4 on IRQ3. Don't ask me why.
Orange and White, Orange, Green and White, Blue, Blue and White, Green, Brown and White, Brown. (Sing to the tune Mary Had A Little Lamb.) When the times comes, you will know why that is important (hint: network cabling.)
The IDE hard drive closest to the motherboard on the cable is the slave, the one on the far end of the cable (or the only drive on the cable, if there is only one) is the master. Bitchslap anybody who says otherwise.
The red line on the cable goes towards the power connector or towards the front of the case.
Black wires together when putting the cable from the power supply to the motherboard.
ARCnet isn't picky, you can use two coathangers (metal) to transmit signal as long as they don't touch.
On the Intel vs. AMD - I don't care, just pick one and stick with it.
nVidia video card are better simply because they all use the same drivers so upgrading doesn't require anything more than swapping the old card for the new one.
It used to be cheaper to build your own, but that isn't the case anymore.
Anybody that adds lights to the inside of the case, or a see-through panel or neon or anything like that is a pathetic loser and isn't worth your attention.
Pay special attention when wiring the power supply to the switch on your new case. The wires aren't keyed and you can cause a wicked short if you don't get it right.
Twist two wires together, use the iron to get the wires really hot, put the soldier on the hot wires. If the wires aren't hot enough to melt the solder then heat the wires hotter, don't use the iron to melt the solder.
Don't eat the solder, not even a little.
Static electricity kills hardware. Wear a grounding strap, spray the carpet with fabric softener.
Enable the encryption on your wireless point.
You can tell if a 9v battery has power by touching it to your tongue. Don't try this with anything plugged into the wall.
Exotic cooling and overclocking are like hooker sex. Expensive, and you don't really get anything you wouldn't get anyways if you were patient and waited a few months, except maybe a fried PC / PeePee.
If you have to choose between $200 worth of processor upgrade or $200 worth of additional memory, go with the memory.
If you can't tell the difference between two systems / components / configurations without a stopwatch, they are equally fast. A 4.3% advantage isn't really faster. 300%, now THAT's faster.
How about tweaking the spacing of the holes used in the binding process?
Maybe a little binary encoding by skipping some of the holes.
If that worked they would do it with Bibles, and people steal those left and right.
Not sure what they do with them once they steal it, though, cause they sure as hell aren't reading them.