You almost keyed in on the real controversy - not that you got an ad to a competing airline, but that the ad-engine knew you were surfing an airline's website for ticket reservations in the first place. The phrase you are looking for here is 'spyware' - their is someone (a program) running on your computer watching what you do, where you surf, potentially capturing every keystroke and determining what you are doing in order to present you with that wifi ad for a competing airline. Therein lies the real problem I have with these 'browser helper objects'.
I call bullshit on the whole US education issue. The NASA engineers that put a man on the moon were not a random cross section of the general US populace. The engineers at PARC were not a gaggle of people picked randomly from the general US population. The scientists that developed the LASER, RADAR, every lab coat wearing nerd at JPL and The AeroSpace Corporation in El Segundo CA (the guys that actually did the work for Mercury and Gemini and GPS) - NONE of those guys were or are representative of the 'average' American High School student.
Those guys are the top 1% of the top 1% - always have been, always will be. The bottom 90% of the American student body can be a bunch of druggies listening to bad music (see also : the 60's (hippy movement), which also coincides with NASA putting men on the moon) and the elite of the elite will still be worlds apart and above, quite bluntly 'the best.' We have the same people in the workforce we had five years ago - their education hasn't changed one bit, unless it has gotten better via continuing education. Regardless of what is happening in K-12, the American workforce is still full of the same people that brought you all of the wonderful technology the Benedict Arnold CEO's are now saying they can't find anybody smart enough to work on here in the States. Bullshit. Complete bullshit.
What has changed? The work atmosphere, the opportunities available, the ability for those brilliant American employees to find jobs that can sustain a family in a country where the first $2,000 each month goes to taxes, the next $500 each month goes to health insurance, and the next $2,500 each month goes towards a mortgage payment, property taxes, fixed bills like electricity, water, phone, gas, etc. That is $60,000 a year before you even think about putting food in your mouth or getting in a vehicle to drive to work or putting on clothes to work in...
It has nothing to do with whether or not a school has a science lab, and everything to do with whether or not there are jobs out there in science labs doing work, research. If the Benedict Arnold CEOs out there want to point fingers for lack of progress in R&D they can point them at themselves for cutting R&D budgets. The people are there to man them, same people that brought you all those nifty tech toys you currently enjoy - where the fsck are the jobs in R&D?
Anybody that thinks that American students on the average are a bunch of clueless stupid losers is correct, inasmuch as that has ALWAYS been the case. Anybody that honestly believes that the top 1% isn't easily as sharp, intelligent, and eager to excel as the top 1% of previous generations is a stupid motherfscker that needs to go visit the kids at MIT, CalPoly, etc.
I call bullshit on the whole US education issue. The NASA engineers that put a man on the moon were not a random cross section of the general US populace. The engineers at PARC were not a gaggle of people picked randomly from the general US population. The scientists that developed the LASER, RADAR, every lab coat wearing nerd at JPL and The AeroSpace Corporation in El Segundo CA (the guys that actually did the work for Mercury and Gemini and GPS) - NONE of those guys were or are representative of the 'average' American High School student.
Those guys are the top 1% of the top 1% - always have been, always will be. The bottom 90% of the American student body can be a bunch of druggies listening to bad music (see also : the 60's (hippy movement), which also coincides with NASA putting men on the moon) and the elite of the elite will still be worlds apart and above, quite bluntly 'the best.' We have the same people in the workforce we had five years ago - their education hasn't changed one bit, unless it has gotten better via continuing education. Regardless of what is happening in K-12, the American workforce is still full of the same people that brought you all of the wonderful technology the Benedict Arnold CEO's are now saying they can't find anybody smart enough to work on here in the States. Bullshit. Complete bullshit.
What has changed? The work atmosphere, the opportunities available, the ability for those brilliant American employees to find jobs that can sustain a family in a country where the first $2,000 each month goes to taxes, the next $500 each month goes to health insurance, and the next $2,500 each month goes towards a mortgage payment, property taxes, fixed bills like electricity, water, phone, gas, etc. That is $60,000 a year before you even think about putting food in your mouth or getting in a vehicle to drive to work or putting on clothes to work in...
It has nothing to do with whether or not a school has a science lab, and everything to do with whether or not there are jobs out there in science labs doing work, research. If the Benedict Arnold CEOs out there want to point fingers for lack of progress in R&D they can point them at themselves for cutting R&D budgets. The people are there to man them, same people that brought you all those nifty tech toys you currently enjoy - where the fsck are the jobs in R&D?
Anybody that thinks that American students on the average are a bunch of clueless stupid losers is correct, inasmuch as that has ALWAYS been the case. Anybody that honestly believes that the top 1% isn't easily as sharp, intelligent, and eager to excel as the top 1% of previous generations is a stupid motherfscker that needs to go visit the kids at MIT, CalPoly, etc.
That was the first thing I thought of, because we here all remember the DMCA as the 'anti-hacking' bill. Then I RTFA and was reminded that DMCA is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act - which also includes some circumvention provisions but mainly deals with... copyrights on digital stuff from this millenium, if I had to guess.
Re:Think of the costs associated...
on
Koalas Gone Wild
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well it seems that on Kangaroo Island the koalas don't have any natural predators. Seems the trick is going to be to arm the kangaroos and teach them that koala meat is yummy.
That or bring tigers to Kangaroo Island, that will fix things right up!
Oh man, just start a rumor that Koala meat is a delicacy and a powerful aphrodisiac (like shark fin, powdered tiger penis, etc) in Japan and sell them for $1,300 a kilo in Tokyo. No better way to clean out an entire species than to get Nippon thinking that it is a delicacy or a powerful aphrodisiac.
BTW - no joke. Look at the poor sharks, blubber whales, tigers, etc. The trick isn't getting them to start, it is getting them to stop.
They spend up to 20 hours a day asleep, and the 4 hours they are awake they spend in a drugged up stupor stuffing their faces. They are not particularly discriminating about where they pee.
Sounds like a room-mate I had in college.
Still, I would love one as a pet. Given the two choices, either slaughter 20,000 of them, or sell them as exotic pets for $2,500 apiece for $50M in profit - I think the 'exotic pet' avenue needs to be reconsidered.
Honestly, I see this is a massive weak point in America's armor - if Osama and Al Qaeda really wanted to hurt America bad, I mean totally cripple America - they would destroy all the US owned tech centers in India. Nothing scares me more than this thought, honestly.
I dare Al Qaeda to try, of course - I double dog dare them. Bunch of pussies. As long as even one US owned tech center still stands in India, Al Qaeda shows themselves to be in bed with the Americans and Jews.
And they're cheap too! I just checked, baseline model is running $399 minus a $100 rebate (God I hate fscking rebates, but...) for a grand total of $299 delivered to your house, one year on-site warranty.
P4/2.4GHz with HT 128M DDR pc3200 (I recommend add more) 40G IDE No OS, has drivers for Windows and/or RedHat Gigabit NIC Keyboard/Mouse/48x CD
Evidently has an AGP slot for upgrading the video, but expect no support for this.
Take a schoolchild's text book in your hands. Stand up on your chair. Drop the textbook onto the floor. Pick it up. Rinse. Repeat until the book is no longer fit for human consumption as a learning device.
Try that with a laptop.
If you think kids are hard on books, wait until you see how hard they are on toys. If these things last a year apiece on the average I will be very impressed.
Figure $2,000 per laptop by the time IBM gives them the 'educational discount' on these $1,350 machines (don't worry, Apple does the same thing.) Twenty five students per classroom, that's $50k. Teachers don't make $50k a year, give or take - and we still can't afford enough of them to begin with.
Someone in Dallas is getting paid under the table, no doubt. Follow the money - Texas has about the best government money can buy.
I grew up poor and the end of year was freaky time if someone lost a $30 school book. God help the poor kids that have to come up with $1,500 to replace a stolen / broken / lost laptop.
Not to mention the best example of existing HMD (the one in the Apache) meant wearing a helmet the size of a Volkswagen Bug and being tethered to a $20M helicopter. It was cool, but subtle it wasn't.
Close, but no. Actually the goggles were passive, there was a base station that knew where you were and followed you around with lasers aimed at your face drawing the picture on the front of your tinted goggles.
In effect, these are way cooler than Hiro's because nobody can stand between you and the base station. Granted his had much higher resolution and color depth, throughput to the Internet, and were a complete work of fiction.
Ack - just realized that these are more like the Gargoyle setup that he got later on in the book - in fact I think the Gargoyle rig was monochrome also. If this is what you were referring to, I agree with you.
This would be a nice side effect of the Ashcroft RFID Identification bill being pushed through congress - once everybody is carrying RFID and can be uniquely identified by the surrounding sensors this would be a trivial extension to the existing infrastructure. I guess law enforcement might get first dibs, but it would bump up the 92% certainty to about 100% once they work out the kinks.
You guys miss the whole groundbreaking aspect of this? The HUD! This is what we have been waiting for - heads up display and it is finally (almost) affordable.
For those of you familiar with the feedback in the Star Wars Galaxies HUD, envision coupling this thing with a tiny GPS module - now you could superimpose a top down map of the surrounding area (zoom in / out), heading, speed, waypoints. Couple this with the RFID encoding every person is going to have in the next few years and it could actually accept data from the MCP and put every person's name over their head, plus make available a quick lookup of statistical information (age, date of birth, relatives, occupation, phone number, etc..) Be able to interact with Google, MapQuest, etc in real time everywhere you go.
Look the company up, if it is public (traded on NASDAQ or whatever) you can find their quarterly reports and get a feel for their cashflow. If they are burning $5M a quarter on income of $1.3M a quarter, they are going to burn out.
Is it a company you would be proud to admit working for to your friends / family / peers / random people?
Are you going to be able to keep your skills current?
Is the company actively outsourcing anything right now? If so, remember that your division may be next.
Publicly held or private company? Too many company leaders do stupid shit 'for the good of the stockholders' in order to tweak quarterly reports, destroying the company in the process. See also : HP, SCO, Kodak, Tyco, Enron...
The last quarter they had layoffs, what was the sum of the executive bonuses?
Cubes or offices? The answer of course is 'cube' but watch their faces when they answer to get a feel for exactly how important your position will be within the company. If you sense distain, a certain sneering... the company sees your position as an unnecessary overhead that it desperately wants to eliminate. If they try to explain in a happy way how much more productive you will be in the cube farm then they appreciate you or at least don't look down on those in that position.
Describe during the interview the unGodly 120 hour weeks you put in during the release cycle of your last project. If they aren't impressed, they already expect all their developers to work 80 hour weeks - and expect their devs to be thankful for the opportunity.
Anytime someone posts a link to their resume I generally follow it and come back to shred them and tell them all the ways their resume sucks (ie, constructive criticism.) I find it entertaining, even though sometimes I can be a dick about it.
Your resume is well formatted, informative, devoid of any of any obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, shows good linear progression, doesn't list yourself as 'President and CEO' of any bullshit company that was a flash in the.COM pan, none of the other easily found links on your home site are contraversial or offensive, none of your contact email addresses are mickey mouse or childish, and it isn't hosted on a server with an offensive name.
How much money are we talking about? That could have a big impact on a lot of our attitudes - for $25k a year I say stay in school, but once that number exceeds... $85k a year I would say consider dropping out, living like you did in college (get better clothes to work in) and put every last penny into the bank so as soon as this company goes under you can go right back to school and live it up while you are there.
-My advice is to take the job for a year and then go back to school.
Don't do it. You are never as rich as you were your first year out of college because you can still live like you did as a poor college kid (on $500 a month), but you have 4x that coming in ($2,000 after taxes isn't too far a stretch.) All of a sudden you have $1,500 a month in discressionary income (money for toys after you pay your fixed expenses like rent, bills, etc.) And $1,500 a month is a LOT for discressionary income, hell I don't think too many of us have an extra $1,500 a month laying around (every month) now, even the guys making $90k a year.
Because like how you fill up whatever size hard drive you buy, you adjust your lifestyle to spend whatever you make. Got extra money so you move into a nicer place with no roommate - there's an extra $750 a month. Got extra money so you go buy a nice car - there goes $300 a month. Forgot about insurance on that car, there's $100 a month. Need a nice set of electronics for the new house, there goes four grand, plus a new computer because you got plenty of cash, going out to eat and party to meet girls... all of a sudden your $2,000 a month take home is just covering all your fixed expenses plus lifestyle, and the payments on a few of your toys don't expire for three more years. All of a sudden you can't afford to go back to college because your fixed expenses (mortgage, car payment, insurance, four bottles of 15 year old Glenfiddich every month, etc.) would eat you alive if you quit your job.
If you want a bachelor's degree, stay put and hammer it out. Once you graduate nobody can take that away from you. Personally I recommend getting it, but I would give serious thought to going a different direction (anything besides IT) but maybe I'm just bitter. If you really want to go out and get a job then don't let anything stop you - but go into it knowing you are cashing out early and probably limiting your long term potential. I know more than one guy that got into the business writing HTML (dropped out of college) during the boom - none are working in IT now. One is selling new cars for a Chevy dealer and is making pretty good money, for what it is worth.
In racing there is a saying : you go slower -here- so you can go faster -here-. It has to do with corners just before long straight runs, but it applies to 19 year olds looking to the future. That said, it doesn't take a four year degree in CS to write web pages / be a WebMaster.
Want some real world feedback? Envision yourself in your current position, college guy in his first year. You are considering who to take as a roommate and one guy tries to impress you with his report card from the 8th grade. Not only are you not going to be impressed, you are going to bitchslap him for bringing his 8th grade report card when everybody else is telling you about the killer stuff they did their last year of college or during the summer after they graduated.
Anybody in college not only went to 8th grade but completely dismisses as a potential candidate anybody that brings up how glorious they were in the 8th grade.
Fast forward a few years to the working world, bosses hiring people to do whatever you do with a stack of resumes and you proudly present your associates degree. All the other guys hammering out a bachelor's could have also applied for and got their AA in whatever along the path but didn't even bother filling out the paperwork because in the big scope of things not only does an AA really matter, anybody proud of their AA isn't catching the clue. Refer back to the top of this for a good example.
If you honestly want to work as a Web Developer and want to add value to yourself to a prospective employer, forget anything you did in the 8th grade and forget an AA. Look into a Cisco Certification program that will teach you from the ground up how to design high availability, scalable, high performance networks as a value add to your job as WebMaster - it will be faster, more productive, have a better return on investment (dollars and hours) and will make you stand out when it is time to hire and promote (or even retain during layoffs.)
Slashdot Mirror
You almost keyed in on the real controversy - not that you got an ad to a competing airline, but that the ad-engine knew you were surfing an airline's website for ticket reservations in the first place. The phrase you are looking for here is 'spyware' - their is someone (a program) running on your computer watching what you do, where you surf, potentially capturing every keystroke and determining what you are doing in order to present you with that wifi ad for a competing airline. Therein lies the real problem I have with these 'browser helper objects'.
I call bullshit on the whole US education issue. The NASA engineers that put a man on the moon were not a random cross section of the general US populace. The engineers at PARC were not a gaggle of people picked randomly from the general US population. The scientists that developed the LASER, RADAR, every lab coat wearing nerd at JPL and The AeroSpace Corporation in El Segundo CA (the guys that actually did the work for Mercury and Gemini and GPS) - NONE of those guys were or are representative of the 'average' American High School student.
...
Those guys are the top 1% of the top 1% - always have been, always will be. The bottom 90% of the American student body can be a bunch of druggies listening to bad music (see also : the 60's (hippy movement), which also coincides with NASA putting men on the moon) and the elite of the elite will still be worlds apart and above, quite bluntly 'the best.' We have the same people in the workforce we had five years ago - their education hasn't changed one bit, unless it has gotten better via continuing education. Regardless of what is happening in K-12, the American workforce is still full of the same people that brought you all of the wonderful technology the Benedict Arnold CEO's are now saying they can't find anybody smart enough to work on here in the States. Bullshit. Complete bullshit.
What has changed? The work atmosphere, the opportunities available, the ability for those brilliant American employees to find jobs that can sustain a family in a country where the first $2,000 each month goes to taxes, the next $500 each month goes to health insurance, and the next $2,500 each month goes towards a mortgage payment, property taxes, fixed bills like electricity, water, phone, gas, etc. That is $60,000 a year before you even think about putting food in your mouth or getting in a vehicle to drive to work or putting on clothes to work in
It has nothing to do with whether or not a school has a science lab, and everything to do with whether or not there are jobs out there in science labs doing work, research. If the Benedict Arnold CEOs out there want to point fingers for lack of progress in R&D they can point them at themselves for cutting R&D budgets. The people are there to man them, same people that brought you all those nifty tech toys you currently enjoy - where the fsck are the jobs in R&D?
Anybody that thinks that American students on the average are a bunch of clueless stupid losers is correct, inasmuch as that has ALWAYS been the case. Anybody that honestly believes that the top 1% isn't easily as sharp, intelligent, and eager to excel as the top 1% of previous generations is a stupid motherfscker that needs to go visit the kids at MIT, CalPoly, etc.
I call bullshit on the whole US education issue. The NASA engineers that put a man on the moon were not a random cross section of the general US populace. The engineers at PARC were not a gaggle of people picked randomly from the general US population. The scientists that developed the LASER, RADAR, every lab coat wearing nerd at JPL and The AeroSpace Corporation in El Segundo CA (the guys that actually did the work for Mercury and Gemini and GPS) - NONE of those guys were or are representative of the 'average' American High School student.
...
Those guys are the top 1% of the top 1% - always have been, always will be. The bottom 90% of the American student body can be a bunch of druggies listening to bad music (see also : the 60's (hippy movement), which also coincides with NASA putting men on the moon) and the elite of the elite will still be worlds apart and above, quite bluntly 'the best.' We have the same people in the workforce we had five years ago - their education hasn't changed one bit, unless it has gotten better via continuing education. Regardless of what is happening in K-12, the American workforce is still full of the same people that brought you all of the wonderful technology the Benedict Arnold CEO's are now saying they can't find anybody smart enough to work on here in the States. Bullshit. Complete bullshit.
What has changed? The work atmosphere, the opportunities available, the ability for those brilliant American employees to find jobs that can sustain a family in a country where the first $2,000 each month goes to taxes, the next $500 each month goes to health insurance, and the next $2,500 each month goes towards a mortgage payment, property taxes, fixed bills like electricity, water, phone, gas, etc. That is $60,000 a year before you even think about putting food in your mouth or getting in a vehicle to drive to work or putting on clothes to work in
It has nothing to do with whether or not a school has a science lab, and everything to do with whether or not there are jobs out there in science labs doing work, research. If the Benedict Arnold CEOs out there want to point fingers for lack of progress in R&D they can point them at themselves for cutting R&D budgets. The people are there to man them, same people that brought you all those nifty tech toys you currently enjoy - where the fsck are the jobs in R&D?
Anybody that thinks that American students on the average are a bunch of clueless stupid losers is correct, inasmuch as that has ALWAYS been the case. Anybody that honestly believes that the top 1% isn't easily as sharp, intelligent, and eager to excel as the top 1% of previous generations is a stupid motherfscker that needs to go visit the kids at MIT, CalPoly, etc.
Be careful of what you wish for - lest your wishes come true.
That was the first thing I thought of, because we here all remember the DMCA as the 'anti-hacking' bill. Then I RTFA and was reminded that DMCA is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act - which also includes some circumvention provisions but mainly deals with ... copyrights on digital stuff from this millenium, if I had to guess.
Didn't work so well on that whale though.
Exploding Whale
Well it seems that on Kangaroo Island the koalas don't have any natural predators. Seems the trick is going to be to arm the kangaroos and teach them that koala meat is yummy.
That or bring tigers to Kangaroo Island, that will fix things right up!
Oh man, just start a rumor that Koala meat is a delicacy and a powerful aphrodisiac (like shark fin, powdered tiger penis, etc) in Japan and sell them for $1,300 a kilo in Tokyo. No better way to clean out an entire species than to get Nippon thinking that it is a delicacy or a powerful aphrodisiac.
BTW - no joke. Look at the poor sharks, blubber whales, tigers, etc. The trick isn't getting them to start, it is getting them to stop.
The punchline to the koala joke is "Eats, shoots, and leaves." The rest has been left as an exercise for the reader.
They spend up to 20 hours a day asleep, and the 4 hours they are awake they spend in a drugged up stupor stuffing their faces. They are not particularly discriminating about where they pee.
Sounds like a room-mate I had in college.
Still, I would love one as a pet. Given the two choices, either slaughter 20,000 of them, or sell them as exotic pets for $2,500 apiece for $50M in profit - I think the 'exotic pet' avenue needs to be reconsidered.
Honestly, I see this is a massive weak point in America's armor - if Osama and Al Qaeda really wanted to hurt America bad, I mean totally cripple America - they would destroy all the US owned tech centers in India. Nothing scares me more than this thought, honestly.
I dare Al Qaeda to try, of course - I double dog dare them. Bunch of pussies.
As long as even one US owned tech center still stands in India, Al Qaeda shows themselves to be in bed with the Americans and Jews.
Working on a new sig, ignore the following :
And they're cheap too! I just checked, baseline model is running $399 minus a $100 rebate (God I hate fscking rebates, but ...) for a grand total of $299 delivered to your house, one year on-site warranty.
P4/2.4GHz with HT
128M DDR pc3200 (I recommend add more)
40G IDE
No OS, has drivers for Windows and/or RedHat
Gigabit NIC
Keyboard/Mouse/48x CD
Evidently has an AGP slot for upgrading the video, but expect no support for this.
Take a schoolchild's text book in your hands. Stand up on your chair. Drop the textbook onto the floor. Pick it up. Rinse. Repeat until the book is no longer fit for human consumption as a learning device.
Try that with a laptop.
If you think kids are hard on books, wait until you see how hard they are on toys. If these things last a year apiece on the average I will be very impressed.
Figure $2,000 per laptop by the time IBM gives them the 'educational discount' on these $1,350 machines (don't worry, Apple does the same thing.) Twenty five students per classroom, that's $50k. Teachers don't make $50k a year, give or take - and we still can't afford enough of them to begin with.
Someone in Dallas is getting paid under the table, no doubt. Follow the money - Texas has about the best government money can buy.
I grew up poor and the end of year was freaky time if someone lost a $30 school book. God help the poor kids that have to come up with $1,500 to replace a stolen / broken / lost laptop.
Who said anything about pawn shops?
Looks like I'm getting a new Beowulf cluster this year!
0. Install service packs, patches. .jpg viewer
:
:
1. Adobe Acrobat
2. Acdsee -
3. AdSubtract - popup stopper
4. Diskeeper - advanced defragger
5. WinZip
6. ZTree - www.ztree.com - CUI file manager that faithfully replicates XTree Gold 2.x
7. WS_FTP
On beefy machines I will be using for work or intense fun
8. MS Office
9. Visual Studio
10. VMware
If it has a burner
11. Nero
Not to mention the best example of existing HMD (the one in the Apache) meant wearing a helmet the size of a Volkswagen Bug and being tethered to a $20M helicopter. It was cool, but subtle it wasn't.
Close, but no. Actually the goggles were passive, there was a base station that knew where you were and followed you around with lasers aimed at your face drawing the picture on the front of your tinted goggles.
In effect, these are way cooler than Hiro's because nobody can stand between you and the base station. Granted his had much higher resolution and color depth, throughput to the Internet, and were a complete work of fiction.
Ack - just realized that these are more like the Gargoyle setup that he got later on in the book - in fact I think the Gargoyle rig was monochrome also. If this is what you were referring to, I agree with you.
This would be a nice side effect of the Ashcroft RFID Identification bill being pushed through congress - once everybody is carrying RFID and can be uniquely identified by the surrounding sensors this would be a trivial extension to the existing infrastructure. I guess law enforcement might get first dibs, but it would bump up the 92% certainty to about 100% once they work out the kinks.
I think it is a monocle, meaning it only goes over one eye.
You guys miss the whole groundbreaking aspect of this? The HUD! This is what we have been waiting for - heads up display and it is finally (almost) affordable.
For those of you familiar with the feedback in the Star Wars Galaxies HUD, envision coupling this thing with a tiny GPS module - now you could superimpose a top down map of the surrounding area (zoom in / out), heading, speed, waypoints. Couple this with the RFID encoding every person is going to have in the next few years and it could actually accept data from the MCP and put every person's name over their head, plus make available a quick lookup of statistical information (age, date of birth, relatives, occupation, phone number, etc..) Be able to interact with Google, MapQuest, etc in real time everywhere you go.
Simply amazing.
I suggest some of the following :
...
... the company sees your position as an unnecessary overhead that it desperately wants to eliminate. If they try to explain in a happy way how much more productive you will be in the cube farm then they appreciate you or at least don't look down on those in that position.
Look the company up, if it is public (traded on NASDAQ or whatever) you can find their quarterly reports and get a feel for their cashflow. If they are burning $5M a quarter on income of $1.3M a quarter, they are going to burn out.
Is it a company you would be proud to admit working for to your friends / family / peers / random people?
Are you going to be able to keep your skills current?
Is the company actively outsourcing anything right now? If so, remember that your division may be next.
Publicly held or private company? Too many company leaders do stupid shit 'for the good of the stockholders' in order to tweak quarterly reports, destroying the company in the process. See also : HP, SCO, Kodak, Tyco, Enron
The last quarter they had layoffs, what was the sum of the executive bonuses?
Cubes or offices? The answer of course is 'cube' but watch their faces when they answer to get a feel for exactly how important your position will be within the company. If you sense distain, a certain sneering
Describe during the interview the unGodly 120 hour weeks you put in during the release cycle of your last project. If they aren't impressed, they already expect all their developers to work 80 hour weeks - and expect their devs to be thankful for the opportunity.
Anytime someone posts a link to their resume I generally follow it and come back to shred them and tell them all the ways their resume sucks (ie, constructive criticism.) I find it entertaining, even though sometimes I can be a dick about it.
.COM pan, none of the other easily found links on your home site are contraversial or offensive, none of your contact email addresses are mickey mouse or childish, and it isn't hosted on a server with an offensive name.
Your resume is well formatted, informative, devoid of any of any obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, shows good linear progression, doesn't list yourself as 'President and CEO' of any bullshit company that was a flash in the
Good job.
How much money are we talking about? That could have a big impact on a lot of our attitudes - for $25k a year I say stay in school, but once that number exceeds ... $85k a year I would say consider dropping out, living like you did in college (get better clothes to work in) and put every last penny into the bank so as soon as this company goes under you can go right back to school and live it up while you are there.
-My advice is to take the job for a year and then go back to school.
... all of a sudden your $2,000 a month take home is just covering all your fixed expenses plus lifestyle, and the payments on a few of your toys don't expire for three more years. All of a sudden you can't afford to go back to college because your fixed expenses (mortgage, car payment, insurance, four bottles of 15 year old Glenfiddich every month, etc.) would eat you alive if you quit your job.
Don't do it. You are never as rich as you were your first year out of college because you can still live like you did as a poor college kid (on $500 a month), but you have 4x that coming in ($2,000 after taxes isn't too far a stretch.) All of a sudden you have $1,500 a month in discressionary income (money for toys after you pay your fixed expenses like rent, bills, etc.) And $1,500 a month is a LOT for discressionary income, hell I don't think too many of us have an extra $1,500 a month laying around (every month) now, even the guys making $90k a year.
Because like how you fill up whatever size hard drive you buy, you adjust your lifestyle to spend whatever you make. Got extra money so you move into a nicer place with no roommate - there's an extra $750 a month. Got extra money so you go buy a nice car - there goes $300 a month. Forgot about insurance on that car, there's $100 a month. Need a nice set of electronics for the new house, there goes four grand, plus a new computer because you got plenty of cash, going out to eat and party to meet girls
If you want a bachelor's degree, stay put and hammer it out. Once you graduate nobody can take that away from you. Personally I recommend getting it, but I would give serious thought to going a different direction (anything besides IT) but maybe I'm just bitter. If you really want to go out and get a job then don't let anything stop you - but go into it knowing you are cashing out early and probably limiting your long term potential. I know more than one guy that got into the business writing HTML (dropped out of college) during the boom - none are working in IT now. One is selling new cars for a Chevy dealer and is making pretty good money, for what it is worth.
In racing there is a saying : you go slower -here- so you can go faster -here-. It has to do with corners just before long straight runs, but it applies to 19 year olds looking to the future. That said, it doesn't take a four year degree in CS to write web pages / be a WebMaster.
Want some real world feedback? Envision yourself in your current position, college guy in his first year. You are considering who to take as a roommate and one guy tries to impress you with his report card from the 8th grade. Not only are you not going to be impressed, you are going to bitchslap him for bringing his 8th grade report card when everybody else is telling you about the killer stuff they did their last year of college or during the summer after they graduated.
Anybody in college not only went to 8th grade but completely dismisses as a potential candidate anybody that brings up how glorious they were in the 8th grade.
Fast forward a few years to the working world, bosses hiring people to do whatever you do with a stack of resumes and you proudly present your associates degree. All the other guys hammering out a bachelor's could have also applied for and got their AA in whatever along the path but didn't even bother filling out the paperwork because in the big scope of things not only does an AA really matter, anybody proud of their AA isn't catching the clue. Refer back to the top of this for a good example.
If you honestly want to work as a Web Developer and want to add value to yourself to a prospective employer, forget anything you did in the 8th grade and forget an AA. Look into a Cisco Certification program that will teach you from the ground up how to design high availability, scalable, high performance networks as a value add to your job as WebMaster - it will be faster, more productive, have a better return on investment (dollars and hours) and will make you stand out when it is time to hire and promote (or even retain during layoffs.)