Well I'm a little conflicted. You have a four digit/. user id, which puts you into the techno-elite. But no mention of a college degree, which puts you with the also-rans (no offense.) Forty seven comma five zero zero ($65k x.75) is a pretty strong paycheck for a hardware tech with an A+ cert or maybe an MCSE with no 4 year degree, depending on where you live (Texas, Florida, Nevada, etc) or not (Boston, California, Seattle.)
Here's a little secret : companies around you aren't hiring sys/admins or A+ techs at $65k a year. I don't care what the magazine survey says - everybody lies on those, pads them with the hopes of driving up the average so a) they don't feel so bad about what they are making, and b) they can show it to their boss and ask for a raise. You can easily knock 10% to 15% off that number to get closer to the truth. Want to know what companies are hiring for? Check the newspaper, Monster.com.
The worst thing that ever.. ok maybe one of the top 12 worst things to ever happen to me was to find out what everybody else in the company made, and that I made less than several people that didn't have college degrees (women at that! how dare they!) Pissed me off for about two years after which I bailed, went to work for another company, struck gold in the tech boom, lost it all in the tech bust, long story short.
Forget 'market value' and those surveys. If you are happy where you are, be happy. If you aren't happy, go get a new job. But whatever you do don't spend two years stewing about feeling underpaid, getting nothing done, before you go. Just go. If you can't find another job, then I suggest that you look for reasons to be happy with the one you got.
If you are good, do a little after hours contract work fixing Windows machines, networking, cleaning up spyware and viruses, etc. It would take about $100 per week in cash under the table to match that 20% raise after all the misc crap (taxes) comes out of that 20%. Who knows, you might get noticed by someone that works at a company that needs a better tech, and get hired at a 20% bump.
I was going to mod you up, but you are anon. Actually this is the smartest thing I expect to read in this thread, while also being the simplest and cheapest.
Lock your damn door, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It doesn't matter if you are in the room, not in the room, just running real quick down to the bathroom or across the hall to another room with the doors open. If you don't have one foot in the door and one foot out the door, throw the deadbolt.
As for your sanity, here are some rules for life in college: 1. Sex. Women do all their freaky stuff in college, so have an open mind and hit as much of it as you possibly can. Buy a big box of condoms and some good lube (google for 'millenium id'). 2. Class. A good education is important, but don't let it interfere with #1. 3. Network. Not TCP/IP, but people. Every job you get in the future is going to be because of who you know, so get to know a LOT of people. Get to know them well so they don't forget you. 4. The Law. Graduating from college doesn't erase your law record, so don't get arrested. 5. The Dollar. You are going to get a lot of offers for credit cards. Credit cards are not 'free money'. If you can't pay cash for it, and if you haven't managed to save enough money to buy it in the last 6 months, what makes you think you are going to earn enough money in the next 6 months to pay for whatever you are considering putting on plastic? Graduating from college doesn't erase your credit history either, so don't screw it up. 6. The Warez and MP3z. Add #5 and #6 above up and decide if you can afford it. I'm guessing you probably can't, so don't do it from your own computer. 7. Take a few classes for personal enrichment. You aren't going to meet the best chicks in your software engineering classes.
The Rocket Drive is similar but different (that thing is a PCI card that lets you put in up to 4G of RAM (PC133 I believe) that is separate from the system memory. I thing that it has an external power supply so it can keep the contents when you power cycle the machine) - but yes the one I was specifically mentioning as a 'test drive' of Solid State Disks is exactly a RAM disk that uses the system's onboard memory, and works exactly like you describe.
I think the ramdrive originated with DOS (not 100% certain DOS did it first, but it was a strong utility in the DOS suite) - but there isn't a native Windows 2000 or XP ramdrive (hence the market for this package.)
The one by Cenatek does some other cool things like setting it to 'back itself up' to your hard drive periodically (in the event of a crash you can recover it) and during system shutdown, restoring from that backup during boot time. That's pretty cool, IMHO, and that it uses system memory is also a good thing since system memory is pretty much the cheapest to upgrade and fastest to access.
Actually I have been thinking about solid state drives for quite some time now. Here's what I came up with the last iteration:
You are pretty much just as well off with a nice tight SATA RAID 5 array. Tom's ran a recent article on throughput for SATA RAID 5 arrays and found that at 6 drives (using those bad ass high end Raptors, I'm guessing) he could break through the 200 megabytes per second sustained transfer rates. About 4-5 times what you and I get on a daily basis from our regular ATA-100 hard drive (which was to be expected, given the number of drives in the array.) A single person on a single machine doing single (or simple multi) tasking isn't going to notice much difference in performance between that and a RAM drive. Some, yes, but almost negligible. The only way the additional performance gains from RAM make sense is multiple users doing radically different things - this would have the drive array thrashing around trying to do all those different things but RAM seek times are effectively zero.
You really wouldn't get the incredible boost in performance you are imagining, simply because hard drives are already pretty fast and approaching the point where they are no longer the bottleneck.
Look here for a review from a little over a year ago. He got all excited about the differences he saw, but in reality many applications didn't show a noticable difference.
Don't get me wrong - I am going to keep trying, as this is a never ending quest... but solid state drives aren't the holy grail of computing.
If you want to experiment with solid state drives, check out Cenatek's Ramdisk. Cost you $69 (they may have a free timed demo, I'm not entirely sure) and you can use it to convert your system RAM to a Ramdrive = solid state disk. If you like what it does, just throw more memory in your computer and go for it. If you can find a way to really speed up your system, be sure to share it with the rest of us ($69 is dirt cheap if you can figure out a way to get a 20% boost in performance - but you would need a bunch of RAM to take advantage of it.
This is the most caustic, evil, angry thing I have ever seen on SlashDot all day (it's pretty early though) - and I agree with you 100%. Thanks for using all the big words for me because I haven't had any caffeine yet - but yea : a ringtone on their phone is the aural equivalent to typing HI U R 2 CUTE. DO U WANT 2 PLAY??? 1 4M H0T!!!!1!1
Maybe he's the violin player in a thrash metal band - which come to think of it wouldn't be a bad thing. I miss the days when music was made with instruments - when was the last time you heard a saxaphone or trumpet in a song (besides when you pop in your Earth Wind & Fire CD.)
Or you could just say fuck it and allocate stuff all over the place on the heap and just leave it hanging out there as objects get created and forgotten. Based on the code I just inherited at work that's perfectly acceptable, I'm just saying.
There is no technical substitute for hand written notes in a technical class (math / ee / cs / whatever.) Good luck on a keyboard trying to enter a differential equation like delta x/xy over a limit as x approaches 0, big S n(x)^n-1 hey fucker slow down I'm trying to type this shit... damnit. Hell it's hard enough doing it by hand in ink, no way it's going to happen on a palm or a laptop - and God forbid the prof make a quick verbal aside about something said three pages ago.
Get copies of the notes from someone else. She might even make a friend in the process - which is what college is all about.
Lets play pretend : $100K salary. Highest tax bracket in the US is 28% for Federal, kicking in at about $70k a year. Lets call this $20k after deductions. Tack on another 6.2% for Social Security, plus another 6.2% to cover employer matching if you are self employed. Another $10k here. Add in 8.25% sales tax on everything in a few of the bigger states. There goes $3k Add in 6% state income tax on the average (I hear CA is more.) Nice $5k here. Kick in a cheapo house at $250,000, tax rate of 2.5% in the city and you are paying another $6k. Register your vehicles and pay the licensing, taxes, and inspection taxes : $1k tops.
That's about $45k right off the top in taxes. You are probably right, just in taxes he isn't paying 60%, but it is brushing up against the Half-Way mark. Add in insurance (car = $1500, house = $1500, medical for a 2 person family = $5,000) and you bust right through the half way mark at $53,000 gone before you buy your first candy bar, and I assumed way low on the price of the house. But going with it, knock another $1,800/month in house payments, $150/mo in electricity, $100/mo in cable (tv/Internet), $100/mo in phone (cell + landline), $50/mo in water, $50/mo in natural gas, $100/mo in gasoline and there goes another $28k, summing $81k before you buy your first candy bar. Throw in a relatively conservative $250/mo for a car payment (lease or buy) because you need something dependable to get you to your $100k/year job, and there goes another $3k - don't forget your 7% ($7k) towards a 401(k) or some sort of retirement plan and bumping you up against the $91k mark in just fixed expenses. Leaves a whopping $9,000 per year, or $750 per month for food, clothes, a computer, software licensing, liquor, eye glasses / contact lenses, medical deductables, lunch at work, toys, haircuts, and what have you.
Yea, $100k/year is a lot, but after the government takes half and fixed expenses take another third there isn't a lot left over.
As for the OP: we all hated taking notes in class. It sucks, and it is painful - but we do it. If you are female, taking tech classes with nerds... I recommend buddying up with a few of the nerdiest guys and offering to bake them brownies or something(!) in exchange for a photocopy of their notes. If it wasn't for my amazing note-taking and scholarly techniques in college I probably never would have seen a decent pair of tits, much less home made brownies.
Actually it does matter. Using the wrong curly brace style (your first example) will likely get you stabbed in the throat by the hardcore programmers on your team. Or at least a stern talking to...
I have to disagree. Once the developers are senior enough, it is rarely a matter of good code vs. bad code - it is more a matter of good documentation vs. bad documentation.
I would much rather find some of the most freaky recursive, self modifying code with hard coded paths, in-line assembly, and assumed run-time conditions - if the entire thing is incredibly well documented... than polite code using proper naming conventions, an xml driven configuration, following proper OO techniques - but didn't write a single line of in-code documentation.
My reasoning is, of course, that someone that has to accurately describe what his code does has to write code that he can accurately describe, and when the next guy goes to tweak it at least he can read an English description of intent, design, assumptions, and expectations - and also the original guy's name if he included it in the dox.
Bad code with good documentation becomes good code, and undocumented good code is effectively bad code.
Actually the xfer rate range makes perfect sense - I envision they are scaling this thing by adding more cards in parallel (think a RAID stripe array of 1G cards) which lets the throughput go up by leaps and bounds.
If I had to guess, that's exactly what they are doing.
If you up and deleted everything related to your workflow automation software tomorrow morning and insured that not a single piece of it ever saw another computer... the Internet wouldn't skip a beat.
Somehow manage to remove every bit of porn from the Internet overnight and by noon there would be a planetary revolution and overthrow of the existing society as we know it.
Hot buttered naked women are the currency with which all computer related debts are eventually paid. Sure, money, hardware, etc... are used as interm currency because you can't exactly mail a Brazilian Woman's Soccer Team home to each of your software engineers - but eventually whatever you pay your developers gets converted in the pursuit of teh chixors.
At the 512M and 1G piece levels, CompactFlash is about the same price as pc3200 SDRAM. SDRAM is hella faster, but CF doesn't forget when the power goes off.
While we are on the subject, whatever happened to the 'Water Drive' - it was supposed to be a water based polymer like jello that would store a GazilloBytes per cubic inch, use three lasers in a holographic fashion ionizing and deionizing at slightly higher than the molecular level, like the two layer DVD media but a lot deeper than two layers... it was supposed to be persistent when the power went off (like a hard drive) but really fast like RAM, was supposed to blend the functionality of both long term storage and working memory. Anybody know whatever happened to the 'water drive'?
I think he was talking about CompactFlash or something of the sort - DIMMs are great, really fast and all that but they have this nasty habit of forgetting whatever they were thinking about when the power goes off (Flash RAM doesn't.)
And yes, it would be hideously expensive at today's prices - but it wasn't too long ago that hard drives were considered a bargain at $1 / Meg, and FlashRAM is currently a tenth of that (DIMMs too.)
Backups are less expensive than recreating your data.
The RAID 1 setup protects against the loss of data due to a single hard drive failure. Doesn't protect against : virus, mistakenly deleted files, mistakenly blown away database, mistakenly copying the 'bad' file over the 'good' file, corrupted file system errors.
You may be much better off breaking your RAID 1 array, throwing the second drive in an external USB 2.0 case and from time to time backing up all your stuff onto it and then keeping it off-site (or at least out of harm's way.)
We are making our own boxes with Opteron 64 3200 with Fedora core II linux 64 bit. We seeing 3 -4 times better performance than the high end Intel pentium 4 and $200 cheaper than the Intel high end P4.
Sweet! What kind of frame rates are you getting on those things in say... Doom III? Everquest? Star Wars Galaxies?
Having lusted for the looks of the Apple G5, the G3 iBook and even the G3 desktop with the rounded handles on top.. some days I wish Apple made hardware that ran all the stuff I run (read : Windows 2000 Pro / XP Pro and all the apps / games I run thereon.)
You laugh. In the old days during MechWarrior II / Mercenaries multiplayer competitions a few of the guys found they could get a massive performance boost if they played in the 'wireframe' mode. It wasn't pretty, but it was very fast.
Honestly I have to question the validity of what Dell is considering.
Every time I look at the Alienware systems and associated prices, I have got to wonder if maybe I'm missing something.
Take their Area-51 - a P4 2.8GHz with HT, 1G DDR pc3200, 80G SATA, sound and a GeForce 5750. $1814.
I just built a new box specifically to run Doom 3 on, got a Dell 400sc for $450 (P4 2.8GHz w HT), added a Gig of DDR pc3200 for $160, dropped in a GeForce FX5900se I got on sale for about $150. Top it off with a seat of XP Home to make things all the same and my box is less than HALF as expensive as the Area-51, has twice as much memory and a faster video card and probably runs all my apps / games just as good, maybe better.
I'm configuring an Alienware box for fun right now... +$331 for the purple case? +$29 for a network cable?
Because God knows all the college kids have got the really good jobs in IT.
Actually if I had to guess, this has absolutely nothing to do with the numbers. Any employer that has a real software developer or sys/admin bail on him for three months because it is summer is going to replace him with a non-college kid the first time around... and any college kid making $20 an hour punching keys on the keyboard forty hours a week isn't going to give up that gravy train for three months just to go home and party all night / sleep in til noon seven days a week. Summer is when the college kids that do work jobs actually put in their most amount of work, saving up for August when they go back to school.
When you describe all the companies (industries) that are now screwed because some company released a free alternative, you make it sound like a bad thing.
Yet you also sound like you are a big proponent of free software.
You can't say that free software is bad when Microsoft does it, but good when other companies do it. Either give Microsoft your moral support in its free software foundation, or take a stand that free software is responsible for the destruction of entire sectors of the tech sector. You really can't have it both ways.
I have been doing 'computer stuff' both as a hobby and professionally for quite some time and I have to admit - this push for free software completely boggles me. It's like auto industry workers trying to convince everyone that cars should be free, and Exxon employees trying to convince everyone that gasoline should be free. The coal miners worked hard days and were abused - but you didn't see any of them standing up and screaming 'Hey, I got an idea : COAL SHOULD BE FREE!'
No, neither OSS nor GPL is a guarantee of future jobs. And conditioning the consumers (businesses in particular) that computer stuff should be free is a pretty stupid idea - I sure hope that's not the best plan we can come up with for insuring our ongoing employment.
Actually the slant you put on it is quite possibly the best avenue to explore.
Take a minute to think about all the Yugos, KIAs and what have you, compare what you expect them to look like after four years (inside and out) to a midrange Mercedes Benz or BMW.
Take into account the recent studies that KIA has fewer reported defects per thousand whatever they hell they study than BMW or Mercedes.
In four years a KIA or a Yugo is going to be completely fucked, scratched, bent, the seats torn and the carpets thrashed, the headliner hanging down and the entire thing smelling like hell, the engine knocking on two cylinders for lack of maintenance - but the MB or BMW is going to be pretty much in pristine condition.
Why?
(Spoiler : Answers ahead) Because the kind of people that buy a car that costs $7,995 new aren't the kind of people that take care of their stuff, and by selling them a car for $7,995 you are reinforcing their belief that cars aren't worth taking care of - maintenance, upkeep, cleaning, etc. The kind of people that spend $60,000 on a car understand and appreciate the worth of a vehicle, pay $900 to do a tune up and pay it quite regularly (eagerly) because it is worth taking care of something you invested so much in to begin with.
A KIA, Yugo, a mobile home or a low rent apartment in the projects - these would all last as long as BMWs and expensive oceanfront condos IF the same level of care and maintenance was done on each. But that's not the case, it is?
By convincing a company that 'software should be free' you are effectively conditioning them that their whole software infrastructure should be free, including installation, maintenance, development, and upkeep. They may not be able to get it for free, but they can get it a hell of a lot cheaper by firing your expensive ass and going overseas... hence the problems we have today. There is a correlation between the initial cost and the ongoing costs - and when you multiply FREE times the ongoing cost factor of XX%, you still get free in most people's head. When a company pays three million dollars for a production environment, they don't bat an eye when you (as a programmer hired to do maintenance and upkeep) are being paid $70k a year. Tell a company you want $70k a year to do ongoing development and maintenance on that same package if they got it for free and the will tell you to get bent.
But honestly I only say this as a side note - F/OSS has pretty much no market penetration so the stuff I described above is merely theory. Most of the problems with employment in the tech sector boil down to outsourcing (overseas and H1-Bs) and overcrowding because anybody that could spell HTML joined the field in the late 90s. I do fear the ramifications of a stronger penetration of F/OSS into the business sector, for these reasons - be real careful of what you ask for - because you might get it.
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Well I'm a little conflicted. /. user id, which puts you into the techno-elite. .75) is a pretty strong paycheck for a hardware tech with an A+ cert or maybe an MCSE with no 4 year degree, depending on where you live (Texas, Florida, Nevada, etc) or not (Boston, California, Seattle.)
.. ok maybe one of the top 12 worst things to ever happen to me was to find out what everybody else in the company made, and that I made less than several people that didn't have college degrees (women at that! how dare they!) Pissed me off for about two years after which I bailed, went to work for another company, struck gold in the tech boom, lost it all in the tech bust, long story short.
You have a four digit
But no mention of a college degree, which puts you with the also-rans (no offense.)
Forty seven comma five zero zero ($65k x
Here's a little secret : companies around you aren't hiring sys/admins or A+ techs at $65k a year. I don't care what the magazine survey says - everybody lies on those, pads them with the hopes of driving up the average so a) they don't feel so bad about what they are making, and b) they can show it to their boss and ask for a raise. You can easily knock 10% to 15% off that number to get closer to the truth. Want to know what companies are hiring for? Check the newspaper, Monster.com.
The worst thing that ever
Forget 'market value' and those surveys. If you are happy where you are, be happy. If you aren't happy, go get a new job. But whatever you do don't spend two years stewing about feeling underpaid, getting nothing done, before you go. Just go. If you can't find another job, then I suggest that you look for reasons to be happy with the one you got.
If you are good, do a little after hours contract work fixing Windows machines, networking, cleaning up spyware and viruses, etc. It would take about $100 per week in cash under the table to match that 20% raise after all the misc crap (taxes) comes out of that 20%. Who knows, you might get noticed by someone that works at a company that needs a better tech, and get hired at a 20% bump.
I was going to mod you up, but you are anon.
:
Actually this is the smartest thing I expect to read in this thread, while also being the simplest and cheapest.
Lock your damn door, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It doesn't matter if you are in the room, not in the room, just running real quick down to the bathroom or across the hall to another room with the doors open. If you don't have one foot in the door and one foot out the door, throw the deadbolt.
As for your sanity, here are some rules for life in college
1. Sex. Women do all their freaky stuff in college, so have an open mind and hit as much of it as you possibly can. Buy a big box of condoms and some good lube (google for 'millenium id').
2. Class. A good education is important, but don't let it interfere with #1.
3. Network. Not TCP/IP, but people. Every job you get in the future is going to be because of who you know, so get to know a LOT of people. Get to know them well so they don't forget you.
4. The Law. Graduating from college doesn't erase your law record, so don't get arrested.
5. The Dollar. You are going to get a lot of offers for credit cards. Credit cards are not 'free money'. If you can't pay cash for it, and if you haven't managed to save enough money to buy it in the last 6 months, what makes you think you are going to earn enough money in the next 6 months to pay for whatever you are considering putting on plastic? Graduating from college doesn't erase your credit history either, so don't screw it up.
6. The Warez and MP3z. Add #5 and #6 above up and decide if you can afford it. I'm guessing you probably can't, so don't do it from your own computer.
7. Take a few classes for personal enrichment. You aren't going to meet the best chicks in your software engineering classes.
The Rocket Drive is similar but different (that thing is a PCI card that lets you put in up to 4G of RAM (PC133 I believe) that is separate from the system memory. I thing that it has an external power supply so it can keep the contents when you power cycle the machine) - but yes the one I was specifically mentioning as a 'test drive' of Solid State Disks is exactly a RAM disk that uses the system's onboard memory, and works exactly like you describe.
I think the ramdrive originated with DOS (not 100% certain DOS did it first, but it was a strong utility in the DOS suite) - but there isn't a native Windows 2000 or XP ramdrive (hence the market for this package.)
The one by Cenatek does some other cool things like setting it to 'back itself up' to your hard drive periodically (in the event of a crash you can recover it) and during system shutdown, restoring from that backup during boot time. That's pretty cool, IMHO, and that it uses system memory is also a good thing since system memory is pretty much the cheapest to upgrade and fastest to access.
Actually I have been thinking about solid state drives for quite some time now. Here's what I came up with the last iteration :
... but solid state drives aren't the holy grail of computing.
You are pretty much just as well off with a nice tight SATA RAID 5 array. Tom's ran a recent article on throughput for SATA RAID 5 arrays and found that at 6 drives (using those bad ass high end Raptors, I'm guessing) he could break through the 200 megabytes per second sustained transfer rates. About 4-5 times what you and I get on a daily basis from our regular ATA-100 hard drive (which was to be expected, given the number of drives in the array.) A single person on a single machine doing single (or simple multi) tasking isn't going to notice much difference in performance between that and a RAM drive. Some, yes, but almost negligible. The only way the additional performance gains from RAM make sense is multiple users doing radically different things - this would have the drive array thrashing around trying to do all those different things but RAM seek times are effectively zero.
You really wouldn't get the incredible boost in performance you are imagining, simply because hard drives are already pretty fast and approaching the point where they are no longer the bottleneck.
Look here for a review from a little over a year ago. He got all excited about the differences he saw, but in reality many applications didn't show a noticable difference.
Don't get me wrong - I am going to keep trying, as this is a never ending quest
If you want to experiment with solid state drives, check out Cenatek's Ramdisk. Cost you $69 (they may have a free timed demo, I'm not entirely sure) and you can use it to convert your system RAM to a Ramdrive = solid state disk. If you like what it does, just throw more memory in your computer and go for it. If you can find a way to really speed up your system, be sure to share it with the rest of us ($69 is dirt cheap if you can figure out a way to get a 20% boost in performance - but you would need a bunch of RAM to take advantage of it.
This is the most caustic, evil, angry thing I have ever seen on SlashDot all day (it's pretty early though) - and I agree with you 100%. Thanks for using all the big words for me because I haven't had any caffeine yet - but yea : a ringtone on their phone is the aural equivalent to typing HI U R 2 CUTE. DO U WANT 2 PLAY??? 1 4M H0T!!!!1!1
Maybe he's the violin player in a thrash metal band - which come to think of it wouldn't be a bad thing. I miss the days when music was made with instruments - when was the last time you heard a saxaphone or trumpet in a song (besides when you pop in your Earth Wind & Fire CD.)
Or you could just say fuck it and allocate stuff all over the place on the heap and just leave it hanging out there as objects get created and forgotten.
Based on the code I just inherited at work that's perfectly acceptable, I'm just saying.
There is no technical substitute for hand written notes in a technical class (math / ee / cs / whatever.) Good luck on a keyboard trying to enter a differential equation like delta x/xy over a limit as x approaches 0, big S n(x)^n-1 hey fucker slow down I'm trying to type this shit ... damnit. Hell it's hard enough doing it by hand in ink, no way it's going to happen on a palm or a laptop - and God forbid the prof make a quick verbal aside about something said three pages ago.
Get copies of the notes from someone else. She might even make a friend in the process - which is what college is all about.
Lets play pretend : $100K salary.
... I recommend buddying up with a few of the nerdiest guys and offering to bake them brownies or something(!) in exchange for a photocopy of their notes. If it wasn't for my amazing note-taking and scholarly techniques in college I probably never would have seen a decent pair of tits, much less home made brownies.
Highest tax bracket in the US is 28% for Federal, kicking in at about $70k a year. Lets call this $20k after deductions.
Tack on another 6.2% for Social Security, plus another 6.2% to cover employer matching if you are self employed. Another $10k here.
Add in 8.25% sales tax on everything in a few of the bigger states. There goes $3k
Add in 6% state income tax on the average (I hear CA is more.) Nice $5k here.
Kick in a cheapo house at $250,000, tax rate of 2.5% in the city and you are paying another $6k.
Register your vehicles and pay the licensing, taxes, and inspection taxes : $1k tops.
That's about $45k right off the top in taxes. You are probably right, just in taxes he isn't paying 60%, but it is brushing up against the Half-Way mark. Add in insurance (car = $1500, house = $1500, medical for a 2 person family = $5,000) and you bust right through the half way mark at $53,000 gone before you buy your first candy bar, and I assumed way low on the price of the house. But going with it, knock another $1,800/month in house payments, $150/mo in electricity, $100/mo in cable (tv/Internet), $100/mo in phone (cell + landline), $50/mo in water, $50/mo in natural gas, $100/mo in gasoline and there goes another $28k, summing $81k before you buy your first candy bar. Throw in a relatively conservative $250/mo for a car payment (lease or buy) because you need something dependable to get you to your $100k/year job, and there goes another $3k - don't forget your 7% ($7k) towards a 401(k) or some sort of retirement plan and bumping you up against the $91k mark in just fixed expenses. Leaves a whopping $9,000 per year, or $750 per month for food, clothes, a computer, software licensing, liquor, eye glasses / contact lenses, medical deductables, lunch at work, toys, haircuts, and what have you.
Yea, $100k/year is a lot, but after the government takes half and fixed expenses take another third there isn't a lot left over.
As for the OP: we all hated taking notes in class. It sucks, and it is painful - but we do it. If you are female, taking tech classes with nerds
Actually it does matter. ...
Using the wrong curly brace style (your first example) will likely get you stabbed in the throat by the hardcore programmers on your team.
Or at least a stern talking to
I have to disagree.
... than polite code using proper naming conventions, an xml driven configuration, following proper OO techniques - but didn't write a single line of in-code documentation.
Once the developers are senior enough, it is rarely a matter of good code vs. bad code - it is more a matter of good documentation vs. bad documentation.
I would much rather find some of the most freaky recursive, self modifying code with hard coded paths, in-line assembly, and assumed run-time conditions - if the entire thing is incredibly well documented
My reasoning is, of course, that someone that has to accurately describe what his code does has to write code that he can accurately describe, and when the next guy goes to tweak it at least he can read an English description of intent, design, assumptions, and expectations - and also the original guy's name if he included it in the dox.
Bad code with good documentation becomes good code, and undocumented good code is effectively bad code.
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted.
Actually the xfer rate range makes perfect sense - I envision they are scaling this thing by adding more cards in parallel (think a RAID stripe array of 1G cards) which lets the throughput go up by leaps and bounds.
If I had to guess, that's exactly what they are doing.
Actually the kid was right.
... the Internet wouldn't skip a beat.
If you up and deleted everything related to your workflow automation software tomorrow morning and insured that not a single piece of it ever saw another computer
Somehow manage to remove every bit of porn from the Internet overnight and by noon there would be a planetary revolution and overthrow of the existing society as we know it.
Hot buttered naked women are the currency with which all computer related debts are eventually paid. Sure, money, hardware, etc... are used as interm currency because you can't exactly mail a Brazilian Woman's Soccer Team home to each of your software engineers - but eventually whatever you pay your developers gets converted in the pursuit of teh chixors.
At the 512M and 1G piece levels, CompactFlash is about the same price as pc3200 SDRAM.
... it was supposed to be persistent when the power went off (like a hard drive) but really fast like RAM, was supposed to blend the functionality of both long term storage and working memory. Anybody know whatever happened to the 'water drive'?
SDRAM is hella faster, but CF doesn't forget when the power goes off.
While we are on the subject, whatever happened to the 'Water Drive' - it was supposed to be a water based polymer like jello that would store a GazilloBytes per cubic inch, use three lasers in a holographic fashion ionizing and deionizing at slightly higher than the molecular level, like the two layer DVD media but a lot deeper than two layers
I think he was talking about CompactFlash or something of the sort - DIMMs are great, really fast and all that but they have this nasty habit of forgetting whatever they were thinking about when the power goes off (Flash RAM doesn't.)
And yes, it would be hideously expensive at today's prices - but it wasn't too long ago that hard drives were considered a bargain at $1 / Meg, and FlashRAM is currently a tenth of that (DIMMs too.)
Backups are less expensive than recreating your data.
The RAID 1 setup protects against the loss of data due to a single hard drive failure. Doesn't protect against : virus, mistakenly deleted files, mistakenly blown away database, mistakenly copying the 'bad' file over the 'good' file, corrupted file system errors.
You may be much better off breaking your RAID 1 array, throwing the second drive in an external USB 2.0 case and from time to time backing up all your stuff onto it and then keeping it off-site (or at least out of harm's way.)
We are making our own boxes with Opteron 64 3200 with Fedora core II linux 64 bit. We seeing 3 -4 times better performance than the high end Intel pentium 4 and $200 cheaper than the Intel high end P4.
... Doom III? Everquest? Star Wars Galaxies?
Sweet! What kind of frame rates are you getting on those things in say
Having lusted for the looks of the Apple G5, the G3 iBook and even the G3 desktop with the rounded handles on top .. some days I wish Apple made hardware that ran all the stuff I run (read : Windows 2000 Pro / XP Pro and all the apps / games I run thereon.)
You laugh. In the old days during MechWarrior II / Mercenaries multiplayer competitions a few of the guys found they could get a massive performance boost if they played in the 'wireframe' mode. It wasn't pretty, but it was very fast.
Honestly I have to question the validity of what Dell is considering.
... +$331 for the purple case? +$29 for a network cable?
Every time I look at the Alienware systems and associated prices, I have got to wonder if maybe I'm missing something.
Take their Area-51 - a P4 2.8GHz with HT, 1G DDR pc3200, 80G SATA, sound and a GeForce 5750. $1814.
I just built a new box specifically to run Doom 3 on, got a Dell 400sc for $450 (P4 2.8GHz w HT), added a Gig of DDR pc3200 for $160, dropped in a GeForce FX5900se I got on sale for about $150. Top it off with a seat of XP Home to make things all the same and my box is less than HALF as expensive as the Area-51, has twice as much memory and a faster video card and probably runs all my apps / games just as good, maybe better.
I'm configuring an Alienware box for fun right now
What exactly am I missing here?
Because God knows all the college kids have got the really good jobs in IT.
... and any college kid making $20 an hour punching keys on the keyboard forty hours a week isn't going to give up that gravy train for three months just to go home and party all night / sleep in til noon seven days a week. Summer is when the college kids that do work jobs actually put in their most amount of work, saving up for August when they go back to school.
Actually if I had to guess, this has absolutely nothing to do with the numbers. Any employer that has a real software developer or sys/admin bail on him for three months because it is summer is going to replace him with a non-college kid the first time around
When you describe all the companies (industries) that are now screwed because some company released a free alternative, you make it sound like a bad thing.
Yet you also sound like you are a big proponent of free software.
You can't say that free software is bad when Microsoft does it, but good when other companies do it. Either give Microsoft your moral support in its free software foundation, or take a stand that free software is responsible for the destruction of entire sectors of the tech sector. You really can't have it both ways.
I have been doing 'computer stuff' both as a hobby and professionally for quite some time and I have to admit - this push for free software completely boggles me. It's like auto industry workers trying to convince everyone that cars should be free, and Exxon employees trying to convince everyone that gasoline should be free. The coal miners worked hard days and were abused - but you didn't see any of them standing up and screaming 'Hey, I got an idea : COAL SHOULD BE FREE!'
No, neither OSS nor GPL is a guarantee of future jobs. And conditioning the consumers (businesses in particular) that computer stuff should be free is a pretty stupid idea - I sure hope that's not the best plan we can come up with for insuring our ongoing employment.
Actually the slant you put on it is quite possibly the best avenue to explore.
... hence the problems we have today. There is a correlation between the initial cost and the ongoing costs - and when you multiply FREE times the ongoing cost factor of XX%, you still get free in most people's head. When a company pays three million dollars for a production environment, they don't bat an eye when you (as a programmer hired to do maintenance and upkeep) are being paid $70k a year. Tell a company you want $70k a year to do ongoing development and maintenance on that same package if they got it for free and the will tell you to get bent.
Take a minute to think about all the Yugos, KIAs and what have you, compare what you expect them to look like after four years (inside and out) to a midrange Mercedes Benz or BMW.
Take into account the recent studies that KIA has fewer reported defects per thousand whatever they hell they study than BMW or Mercedes.
In four years a KIA or a Yugo is going to be completely fucked, scratched, bent, the seats torn and the carpets thrashed, the headliner hanging down and the entire thing smelling like hell, the engine knocking on two cylinders for lack of maintenance - but the MB or BMW is going to be pretty much in pristine condition.
Why?
(Spoiler : Answers ahead)
Because the kind of people that buy a car that costs $7,995 new aren't the kind of people that take care of their stuff, and by selling them a car for $7,995 you are reinforcing their belief that cars aren't worth taking care of - maintenance, upkeep, cleaning, etc.
The kind of people that spend $60,000 on a car understand and appreciate the worth of a vehicle, pay $900 to do a tune up and pay it quite regularly (eagerly) because it is worth taking care of something you invested so much in to begin with.
A KIA, Yugo, a mobile home or a low rent apartment in the projects - these would all last as long as BMWs and expensive oceanfront condos IF the same level of care and maintenance was done on each. But that's not the case, it is?
By convincing a company that 'software should be free' you are effectively conditioning them that their whole software infrastructure should be free, including installation, maintenance, development, and upkeep. They may not be able to get it for free, but they can get it a hell of a lot cheaper by firing your expensive ass and going overseas
But honestly I only say this as a side note - F/OSS has pretty much no market penetration so the stuff I described above is merely theory. Most of the problems with employment in the tech sector boil down to outsourcing (overseas and H1-Bs) and overcrowding because anybody that could spell HTML joined the field in the late 90s. I do fear the ramifications of a stronger penetration of F/OSS into the business sector, for these reasons - be real careful of what you ask for - because you might get it.
I think the building full of Apple G5s at Virginia Tech is a likely candidate.