I don't want the same label as the intern who fixes windoze
It's a category, that's all. The level you occupy in that category is not relevant. The software architect with a PhD in engineering is an engineer, and so is the intern who fixes trivial bugs. The same is true for every other profession--for example, a General Counsel is a lawyer, the same as a newly-hired associate. If they call you "highly-paid IT guy", then it's fine. The label is not really that important; understanding that being called an "IT guy" is not an insult is important.
Having said that, software development is usually done by software developers. IT provides the infrastructure on which software products run, and then runs them. In corporate terms, software developers create enterprise applications for customers, and customers have applications people in their IT department manage them. Those corporate applications people in IT are sometimes application administrators, or web developers, or DBAs.
It would be more effective communication if they referred to software developers as software developers, or something like engineer or programmer. Calling someone IT who isn't IT is confusing, and you end up with the wrong people answering job postings. I wouldn't say you should make a big deal out of it, so I vote "yes" to
Change it slowly over time
If you make a big deal about it, you will definitely look petty.
I love questions like this! Thanks. It has produced some interesting answers, and has been good for a trip down memory lane. As good as everyone's answers have been, they have not all been focused on the context of the question.
This is for a one-semester high school class, we must remember--not a college class, and not for a degree in SF&F. The object is not to make sure that they read everything that everyone must read in the genre, but to (1) introduce the genre, (2) teach about the genre, and (3) whet the appetite for learning and reading more. In addition to the limited time that students have to devote to each class in high school, one must also bear in mind the limited budget for purchasing materials.
With that in mind, I'd put forward three notions: short stories are the best way to introduce readers to a variety of different authors and and archetypes; anthologies are a cost-effective way to deliver short stories; you can't cover it all. To this last point, I would say that there are different strands of fantasy, and that you are only going to touch on the ones that closely overlap science fiction; mainstream fantasy (including, much as I love them, Harry Potter and LOTR) needs to be another class.
The problem with anthologies, however, is that by-and-large they stink out loud. I suppose you have to purchase through your district, and they have preferred publishers, so you'd have to see what they have to offer--and you may be stuck with them. I poked around to see what was commercially available, and I admit I was pretty unimpressed. Of those that are in print, if I were teaching I suppose I would order Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (Galaxy Books, edited by by Eric S. Rabkin) because it has some width of selection and includes some old classics, but I'd wish that I could do better. And maybe you have to not do an anthology... or supplement it with a few novels or collections.
Keeping in mind your context, then, if I were selecting a few additional novels for a one-semester introductory high school class (with limited time and attention spans), I would draw from this list [that is still in print]: Asimov, I, Robot Card, Ender's Game Clarke, Childhood's End Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness Niven, Ringworld Niven and Pournelle, Inferno Sawyer, Flashforward
Mind you this is not my list of the "best" or "must-read", and is not as diverse a set of authors as I would wish, but simply what I think would work for your class--what is accessible at their age, and what makes for good class discussions. I would specifically not include excellent novels like 2001, Snow Crash, Red Mars, etc., because they are not quite old enough to appreciate the themes, literary adroitness, and so on. You and I might have really groked 2001 in high school, but the average high school student today probably would struggle with it.
(Also, having a tie-in with a popular movie or TV show that you can show in class will help those who are more visual or aural learners is helpful.)
Yes, kind of. It depends on what kind of job you are applying for. If you are applying for a job where you spend your time doing hands-on work, then you need to demonstrate that you can do that. But if you are applying for a position at the level of architect or project management, then your ability to memorize and spit back CLI arguments doesn't play into it, and references and interviews are what is relevant.
One way to conceptualize this is to think of different levels of sys admin:
1 - what you say - IT tech (tier 1 helpdesk) or intern
2 - what you do - junior sys admin/senior IT tech
3 - what you know - sys admin
4 - what you think - senior sys admin
5 - what you change - staff sys admin
Obviously, if you are applying for the more senior jobs, testing becomes irrelevant. But if you are switching tracks and applying for a Sys Admin III position after having been a successful programmer, the fact that you are published and are an acknowledged SME in Java doesn't demonstrate that you can build me an SMTP server.
We have also had good success with MX Logic, and the TCO is still lower than an internal implementation for our 1000+ users. Based on our couple of years of experience, just the security aspects you mention would prevent from ever doing anything but outsourced again.
And to extend the "Aunt Tilly" thread... for those of us who mail admin a business, if a customer mistypes an address and gets no 5xx, bounce, or any other sort of response, they will presume that their msg has been received, and get p!ssed off when no action or response is forthcoming. Not to mention the backscatter from the fan down to IT if Tilly happens to be the aunt of the CEO. Dropping them might be reasonable for your personal mail server, but for a business it is a career limiting choice.
My ACM login isn't working, so I didn't read the paper; but from the TFAs, it looks like they are saying that it would be capable of processing at that level. I don't think they are proposing to actual do it. (Even if one could "host the internet", as other posters have already ridiculed.)
You simply start managing things. You find something that needs to be managed and you do it. You remove burdens from weary managerial shoulders. You fix things everybody knows are broken but nobody has the energy to do anything about. In short you become a manager.
This is how I got most of my opportunities--both for becoming a manager, and for getting other opportunities like a technical promotion. The only difference is which/whose problems you solve.
In addition to performing a useful service for your employer and providing them with a nice audition, it's also a bit of a trial run for yourself. As you find more opportunities to do the work at the next level, do you enjoy them and are you any good at them? Better to find out before you ask for the promotion whether you should be doing the work...
I tell trolling recruiters that we maintain a troll newsgroup where we post the names of recruiters and firms who keeps calling; and that not only HR will refused to do business with anyone listed there, but employees and ex-employees looking for work use it as an anti-BBB and will usually refuse to use them also. If I see their number again in the phone log, or hear that they called someone else in the company, I will permanently blacklist them in the phone system and post them to the newsgroup, and they will lose a significant source of leads and referrals.
I'm not sure they believe me, but they at least often decide that I'm crazy and stop bugging me.
I agree completely. I have been able to take an occasional long lunch, go to a ball game, etc. without worrying that someone could not reach me in an emergency, or that an e-mailed alert that a server was down was sitting unread in my mail window at work. I felt the same way about beepers before the BlackBerry Age.
BBs (and beepers) also have the advantage over mobile phones in that they are not so immediate, but provide a bit of a buffer. When you think you have an emergency, I can take a quick look at your mail and possibly determine that you can really wait, and go back to my movie. When the cell phone rings, the only way I can tell if it is an emergency or a stupid question is to answer it (which means having to step out of the theater).
Where does your opinion lay? Should software 'just work', or are users too lazy?
These choices are a false dichotomy. It is possible to have products which just work and which allow users to access more advanced features (and rewards them for learning a little more about what they're trying to use). The UI principle [which should be] at work is called "progressive disclosure": don't overwhelm the user with stuff they need to know or complex steps they need to follow for basic tasks to be accomplished, but let them work their way up to it.
A good example is the UI of a well-designed VCR. Power-on and Play are big buttons right on the front, and the more complicated stuff is behind a flip panel. My non-/. parents don't want to program a Mars rover; they just want to put in the tape of their grandchildren and watch it. On the other hand, my wife who doesn't want Tivo programs complicated, recurring weekly recording schedules; and she took the time to learn how to do it, and has figured out which VCR you just hit Power-off and which VCR who have to hit Power-off and Timer together. And I just want to flip the panel and find some arrow buttons so that my parents' VCR isn't flashing 12:00 while I'm trying to visit with them.
If you want to do something more sophisticated, you need to expect to learn a little about the application you're using; and IMHO most reasonable people are willing and try to do so. But you should be able to just push Play without knowing which codec was used.
It was apparently obvious to the interviewer. Burrows' follow-up in TFA was:
The victim was the investor, who was not getting accurate information about the options their companies were doling out. And in the case of backdating (in which shares are granted at prices below the market price on the day of the grant, guaranteeing the recipient paper profits), insiders were getting a better deal on shares than the company's public investors could get.
List out the current list of products that qualify as "Something Better" than SQL Server.
For one, Progress OpenEdge. My experience from working with both is that Progress is better, faster, cheaper (lowest TCO of the major RDMBS products), and is multi-platform (who is running SQL Server on Linux?). It has a very powerful toolset with the option of using a rich and intuitive 4GL or SQL. It takes next to nothing to maintain--just throw it over the wall and let it hum. And it has good connectors to Oracle, SQL Server, et al, so you can easily have a multi-product shop (which, in the age of acquisitions, is inevitable).
I'd pick Progress over SQL Server every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and I would pick Progress over Oracle for any project except extremely large (>1 TB) databases.
Aren't patents supposed to protect inventors/innovators? I may be jumping to conclusions about NTP, but how can a company that exists solely to litigate patent-infringers get away with what it does?
So, because the guy is dead, his heirs don't have a right to the royalties which (perhaps) should have been paid to him? So, I can steal your invention, and then kill you, and then not have to pay for what I stole? That does not seem just.
Another seemingly propopsed injustice here would be that you suggest that I cannot assign my patent to a company so that I can at least get something out of the deal, some help in my David-Goliath fight, because the company's only reason to exist is patent holding and litigation. Shouldn't I be able to assign my rights to whomever I believe would most benefit me and my heirs?
There are so many choices, narrowing down to a short list will always be controversial--and a good opportunity for reflection and diversifying your to-read list. I enjoyed thinking about this, and playing with the distinction between "geek novel" and sci-fi. FWIW, here's my (alphabetized) top 10 list:
Anderson & Beeson, Assemblers of Infinity Asimov, Foundation Card, Ender's Game Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey Lem, Solaris McDevitt, The Engines of God Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz Niven, Ringworld Reed, Marrow Stephenson, Snow Crash
Anyone want to try "best geek novels translated into English"?
Since you invoke basic hermeneutics... That's a bit of a gloss. I would remind you and the readers that there are many tools (sometimes called "criticisms") available and almost universally accepted by scholars of the Bible and other bodies of literature.
Form criticism, for example, shows us how to analyze a text and determine its "form" or archetypal nature, and this teaches us how to begin to read it. It would not be necessary, to illustrate with a different book, to attempt to determine whether or not one could understand the Psalms literally; it is clearly a body of poetry, and should be read as such. Any attempt to read a "non-literal" form (like poetry) in some "literal" sense is simply nonsense.
One may reasonably state that the Book of Psalms is "true" (contains spiritual truth), divinely inspired, divinely dictated, or divinely approved--and thus could be claimed as "the Word of God"--without nonsensically saying that it should be taken literally. Any statement that a library of books which are of a variety of forms should be taken literally should simply be set aside as ignorant.
If one stipulates this simply notion, then the argument becomes (more interestingly): which books or portions of books are intended to be factual, and are they accurately factual? From a churchy point of view, another important question is: what is the truth contained in these different documents?
To expand on that last just a wee bit more... Jesus told many parables. Many would say that they are "true", in that they tell us something which is true about God or ourselves, etc. No credible scholar would suggest that they be taken literally. But one could certainly take them seriously--could seek and find the intended lesson.
I hate to add to the pedantry, but there is a danger in oversimplifying this stuff; and conversely, there is a real opportunity to discover the richness of a large, well-preserved, ancient body of literature that has been the foundation of many cultures by using more of the tools that scholars have developed.
The find bar is one of the features I like most about FireFox. It's small, out of the way, and does exactly what I expect it to do.
I agree. It works just the way I want it to, and isn't one more tool bar stacked on top. Yes, it is inconveniently located for a mouse user... but I never use the mouse to use it. Keyboarding is faster, and better for my elbow.
Quite correct. If you have ever been handed a pile of 200 resumes to whittle down (all of which begin to look alike after a while) when you're filling just one position, you know you have to have some reasonably objective means to choose the first handful to look at. Certs, degrees, industry-specific experience, open source or other volunteer work: these are all the kinds of things which can bubble a resume to the top.
What you failed to mention in your plea for help is what the location of the system will be, and to what it will be connected. Other posters with similar experience to mine have said that they didn't use anything special... but that they were on a military base, etc.
The certification process is all about controling access to the data and verifying that access was controled (and knowing who to arrest if it wasn't). People in a well-secured site that may only be accessed by persons with the same or higher clearance as the classification of the data being processed can just about get by with a sticker and be done: the facility is handling all of the physical and electronic access control, the unit will never be allowed to leave its room, and so the work is easy. If you are building this for an office where somebody just needs to "do some classified stuff", you have all that other stuff to handle.
In that situation, for example, you need removable hard drives, which will indeed be removed (all of them) between uses, and stored in a container like a safe that is certified for that kind of storage. You may need to make sure that there is no way to write data to a medium other than the hard disk or approved local printer, so you may need to remove or permanently disable the floppy drive, CD burner, and so on. And the machine cannot be on your LAN while it is being used for classified work. Even so, you'll need to pay attention to the selection of OS, turn on all of the auditing features. There will be a lot of process and procedures, check-lists that will need to be followed for each use.
Where you get your hardware is the least of your worries. Buy whatever you want that meets spec, and then expect to do substantial mods to the h/w, OS, etc. If the vendor is willing to remove stuff and do OS mods for you, less work for you.
Good luck. I've heard of groups taking over a year to get a machine certified for processing on their first time out.
Re:My employer's handing out tickets
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 1
That's sweet! My company isn't doing that, but they did let me buy tickets for my entire group to go (on the clock) on opening day, and threw in lunch. Yes, Virginia, there are good places to work!
You must shop at crummy bookstores. I never have a hard time finding Alastair Reynolds at my local oases. However, I will admit that it is more difficult to find UK authors than US authors in US stores. (I have the same problem with Canadian authors.)
Probably, they want the movie to have some more fully-developed characters. The only way that they could bring in the extra background material about Bean and some of the others that is found only in Shadow is to option that book, as well.
Also, I wouldn't want to option the first book and then have somebody else option the sequel and come out with a competing movie. Probably wouldn't happen, but I pay for insurance even though I don't think my house will burn down.
Slashdot Mirror
Why spend money on a laser that's not biodegradable, when instead you can just get Israeli bomb-sniffing mice?
I don't want the same label as the intern who fixes windoze
It's a category, that's all. The level you occupy in that category is not relevant. The software architect with a PhD in engineering is an engineer, and so is the intern who fixes trivial bugs. The same is true for every other profession--for example, a General Counsel is a lawyer, the same as a newly-hired associate. If they call you "highly-paid IT guy", then it's fine. The label is not really that important; understanding that being called an "IT guy" is not an insult is important.
Having said that, software development is usually done by software developers. IT provides the infrastructure on which software products run, and then runs them. In corporate terms, software developers create enterprise applications for customers, and customers have applications people in their IT department manage them. Those corporate applications people in IT are sometimes application administrators, or web developers, or DBAs.
It would be more effective communication if they referred to software developers as software developers, or something like engineer or programmer. Calling someone IT who isn't IT is confusing, and you end up with the wrong people answering job postings. I wouldn't say you should make a big deal out of it, so I vote "yes" to
Change it slowly over time
If you make a big deal about it, you will definitely look petty.
I love questions like this! Thanks. It has produced some interesting answers, and has been good for a trip down memory lane. As good as everyone's answers have been, they have not all been focused on the context of the question.
This is for a one-semester high school class, we must remember--not a college class, and not for a degree in SF&F. The object is not to make sure that they read everything that everyone must read in the genre, but to (1) introduce the genre, (2) teach about the genre, and (3) whet the appetite for learning and reading more. In addition to the limited time that students have to devote to each class in high school, one must also bear in mind the limited budget for purchasing materials.
With that in mind, I'd put forward three notions: short stories are the best way to introduce readers to a variety of different authors and and archetypes; anthologies are a cost-effective way to deliver short stories; you can't cover it all. To this last point, I would say that there are different strands of fantasy, and that you are only going to touch on the ones that closely overlap science fiction; mainstream fantasy (including, much as I love them, Harry Potter and LOTR) needs to be another class.
The problem with anthologies, however, is that by-and-large they stink out loud. I suppose you have to purchase through your district, and they have preferred publishers, so you'd have to see what they have to offer--and you may be stuck with them. I poked around to see what was commercially available, and I admit I was pretty unimpressed. Of those that are in print, if I were teaching I suppose I would order Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology (Galaxy Books, edited by by Eric S. Rabkin) because it has some width of selection and includes some old classics, but I'd wish that I could do better. And maybe you have to not do an anthology... or supplement it with a few novels or collections.
Keeping in mind your context, then, if I were selecting a few additional novels for a one-semester introductory high school class (with limited time and attention spans), I would draw from this list [that is still in print]:
Asimov, I, Robot
Card, Ender's Game
Clarke, Childhood's End
Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Niven, Ringworld
Niven and Pournelle, Inferno
Sawyer, Flashforward
Mind you this is not my list of the "best" or "must-read", and is not as diverse a set of authors as I would wish, but simply what I think would work for your class--what is accessible at their age, and what makes for good class discussions. I would specifically not include excellent novels like 2001, Snow Crash, Red Mars, etc., because they are not quite old enough to appreciate the themes, literary adroitness, and so on. You and I might have really groked 2001 in high school, but the average high school student today probably would struggle with it.
(Also, having a tie-in with a popular movie or TV show that you can show in class will help those who are more visual or aural learners is helpful.)
Hope this helps.
If it was done on company time and company assets, they might not own it, but they have an excellent case for termination.
Yes, kind of. It depends on what kind of job you are applying for. If you are applying for a job where you spend your time doing hands-on work, then you need to demonstrate that you can do that. But if you are applying for a position at the level of architect or project management, then your ability to memorize and spit back CLI arguments doesn't play into it, and references and interviews are what is relevant.
One way to conceptualize this is to think of different levels of sys admin:
1 - what you say - IT tech (tier 1 helpdesk) or intern
2 - what you do - junior sys admin/senior IT tech
3 - what you know - sys admin
4 - what you think - senior sys admin
5 - what you change - staff sys admin
Obviously, if you are applying for the more senior jobs, testing becomes irrelevant. But if you are switching tracks and applying for a Sys Admin III position after having been a successful programmer, the fact that you are published and are an acknowledged SME in Java doesn't demonstrate that you can build me an SMTP server.
Have you read Ill Wind?
We have also had good success with MX Logic, and the TCO is still lower than an internal implementation for our 1000+ users. Based on our couple of years of experience, just the security aspects you mention would prevent from ever doing anything but outsourced again.
And to extend the "Aunt Tilly" thread... for those of us who mail admin a business, if a customer mistypes an address and gets no 5xx, bounce, or any other sort of response, they will presume that their msg has been received, and get p!ssed off when no action or response is forthcoming. Not to mention the backscatter from the fan down to IT if Tilly happens to be the aunt of the CEO. Dropping them might be reasonable for your personal mail server, but for a business it is a career limiting choice.
My ACM login isn't working, so I didn't read the paper; but from the TFAs, it looks like they are saying that it would be capable of processing at that level. I don't think they are proposing to actual do it. (Even if one could "host the internet", as other posters have already ridiculed.)
This is how I got most of my opportunities--both for becoming a manager, and for getting other opportunities like a technical promotion. The only difference is which/whose problems you solve.
In addition to performing a useful service for your employer and providing them with a nice audition, it's also a bit of a trial run for yourself. As you find more opportunities to do the work at the next level, do you enjoy them and are you any good at them? Better to find out before you ask for the promotion whether you should be doing the work...
I tell trolling recruiters that we maintain a troll newsgroup where we post the names of recruiters and firms who keeps calling; and that not only HR will refused to do business with anyone listed there, but employees and ex-employees looking for work use it as an anti-BBB and will usually refuse to use them also. If I see their number again in the phone log, or hear that they called someone else in the company, I will permanently blacklist them in the phone system and post them to the newsgroup, and they will lose a significant source of leads and referrals.
I'm not sure they believe me, but they at least often decide that I'm crazy and stop bugging me.
I worked my ass off, so I should be able to share with anyone.
I agree completely. I have been able to take an occasional long lunch, go to a ball game, etc. without worrying that someone could not reach me in an emergency, or that an e-mailed alert that a server was down was sitting unread in my mail window at work. I felt the same way about beepers before the BlackBerry Age.
BBs (and beepers) also have the advantage over mobile phones in that they are not so immediate, but provide a bit of a buffer. When you think you have an emergency, I can take a quick look at your mail and possibly determine that you can really wait, and go back to my movie. When the cell phone rings, the only way I can tell if it is an emergency or a stupid question is to answer it (which means having to step out of the theater).
These choices are a false dichotomy. It is possible to have products which just work and which allow users to access more advanced features (and rewards them for learning a little more about what they're trying to use). The UI principle [which should be] at work is called "progressive disclosure": don't overwhelm the user with stuff they need to know or complex steps they need to follow for basic tasks to be accomplished, but let them work their way up to it.
A good example is the UI of a well-designed VCR. Power-on and Play are big buttons right on the front, and the more complicated stuff is behind a flip panel. My non-/. parents don't want to program a Mars rover; they just want to put in the tape of their grandchildren and watch it. On the other hand, my wife who doesn't want Tivo programs complicated, recurring weekly recording schedules; and she took the time to learn how to do it, and has figured out which VCR you just hit Power-off and which VCR who have to hit Power-off and Timer together. And I just want to flip the panel and find some arrow buttons so that my parents' VCR isn't flashing 12:00 while I'm trying to visit with them.
If you want to do something more sophisticated, you need to expect to learn a little about the application you're using; and IMHO most reasonable people are willing and try to do so. But you should be able to just push Play without knowing which codec was used.
It was apparently obvious to the interviewer. Burrows' follow-up in TFA was:
The victim was the investor, who was not getting accurate information about the options their companies were doling out. And in the case of backdating (in which shares are granted at prices below the market price on the day of the grant, guaranteeing the recipient paper profits), insiders were getting a better deal on shares than the company's public investors could get.
List out the current list of products that qualify as "Something Better" than SQL Server.
For one, Progress OpenEdge. My experience from working with both is that Progress is better, faster, cheaper (lowest TCO of the major RDMBS products), and is multi-platform (who is running SQL Server on Linux?). It has a very powerful toolset with the option of using a rich and intuitive 4GL or SQL. It takes next to nothing to maintain--just throw it over the wall and let it hum. And it has good connectors to Oracle, SQL Server, et al, so you can easily have a multi-product shop (which, in the age of acquisitions, is inevitable).
I'd pick Progress over SQL Server every day of the week and twice on Sunday, and I would pick Progress over Oracle for any project except extremely large (>1 TB) databases.
Aren't patents supposed to protect inventors/innovators? I may be jumping to conclusions about NTP, but how can a company that exists solely to litigate patent-infringers get away with what it does?
So, because the guy is dead, his heirs don't have a right to the royalties which (perhaps) should have been paid to him? So, I can steal your invention, and then kill you, and then not have to pay for what I stole? That does not seem just.
Another seemingly propopsed injustice here would be that you suggest that I cannot assign my patent to a company so that I can at least get something out of the deal, some help in my David-Goliath fight, because the company's only reason to exist is patent holding and litigation. Shouldn't I be able to assign my rights to whomever I believe would most benefit me and my heirs?
There are so many choices, narrowing down to a short list will always be controversial--and a good opportunity for reflection and diversifying your to-read list. I enjoyed thinking about this, and playing with the distinction between "geek novel" and sci-fi. FWIW, here's my (alphabetized) top 10 list:
Anderson & Beeson, Assemblers of Infinity
Asimov, Foundation
Card, Ender's Game
Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Lem, Solaris
McDevitt, The Engines of God
Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
Niven, Ringworld
Reed, Marrow
Stephenson, Snow Crash
Anyone want to try "best geek novels translated into English"?
Since you invoke basic hermeneutics... That's a bit of a gloss. I would remind you and the readers that there are many tools (sometimes called "criticisms") available and almost universally accepted by scholars of the Bible and other bodies of literature.
Form criticism, for example, shows us how to analyze a text and determine its "form" or archetypal nature, and this teaches us how to begin to read it. It would not be necessary, to illustrate with a different book, to attempt to determine whether or not one could understand the Psalms literally; it is clearly a body of poetry, and should be read as such. Any attempt to read a "non-literal" form (like poetry) in some "literal" sense is simply nonsense.
One may reasonably state that the Book of Psalms is "true" (contains spiritual truth), divinely inspired, divinely dictated, or divinely approved--and thus could be claimed as "the Word of God"--without nonsensically saying that it should be taken literally. Any statement that a library of books which are of a variety of forms should be taken literally should simply be set aside as ignorant.
If one stipulates this simply notion, then the argument becomes (more interestingly): which books or portions of books are intended to be factual, and are they accurately factual? From a churchy point of view, another important question is: what is the truth contained in these different documents?
To expand on that last just a wee bit more... Jesus told many parables. Many would say that they are "true", in that they tell us something which is true about God or ourselves, etc. No credible scholar would suggest that they be taken literally. But one could certainly take them seriously--could seek and find the intended lesson.
I hate to add to the pedantry, but there is a danger in oversimplifying this stuff; and conversely, there is a real opportunity to discover the richness of a large, well-preserved, ancient body of literature that has been the foundation of many cultures by using more of the tools that scholars have developed.
The find bar is one of the features I like most about FireFox. It's small, out of the way, and does exactly what I expect it to do.
I agree. It works just the way I want it to, and isn't one more tool bar stacked on top. Yes, it is inconveniently located for a mouse user... but I never use the mouse to use it. Keyboarding is faster, and better for my elbow.
Quite correct. If you have ever been handed a pile of 200 resumes to whittle down (all of which begin to look alike after a while) when you're filling just one position, you know you have to have some reasonably objective means to choose the first handful to look at. Certs, degrees, industry-specific experience, open source or other volunteer work: these are all the kinds of things which can bubble a resume to the top.
What you failed to mention in your plea for help is what the location of the system will be, and to what it will be connected. Other posters with similar experience to mine have said that they didn't use anything special... but that they were on a military base, etc.
The certification process is all about controling access to the data and verifying that access was controled (and knowing who to arrest if it wasn't). People in a well-secured site that may only be accessed by persons with the same or higher clearance as the classification of the data being processed can just about get by with a sticker and be done: the facility is handling all of the physical and electronic access control, the unit will never be allowed to leave its room, and so the work is easy. If you are building this for an office where somebody just needs to "do some classified stuff", you have all that other stuff to handle.
In that situation, for example, you need removable hard drives, which will indeed be removed (all of them) between uses, and stored in a container like a safe that is certified for that kind of storage. You may need to make sure that there is no way to write data to a medium other than the hard disk or approved local printer, so you may need to remove or permanently disable the floppy drive, CD burner, and so on. And the machine cannot be on your LAN while it is being used for classified work. Even so, you'll need to pay attention to the selection of OS, turn on all of the auditing features. There will be a lot of process and procedures, check-lists that will need to be followed for each use.
Where you get your hardware is the least of your worries. Buy whatever you want that meets spec, and then expect to do substantial mods to the h/w, OS, etc. If the vendor is willing to remove stuff and do OS mods for you, less work for you.
Good luck. I've heard of groups taking over a year to get a machine certified for processing on their first time out.
That's sweet! My company isn't doing that, but they did let me buy tickets for my entire group to go (on the clock) on opening day, and threw in lunch. Yes, Virginia, there are good places to work!
You must shop at crummy bookstores. I never have a hard time finding Alastair Reynolds at my local oases. However, I will admit that it is more difficult to find UK authors than US authors in US stores. (I have the same problem with Canadian authors.)
Probably, they want the movie to have some more fully-developed characters. The only way that they could bring in the extra background material about Bean and some of the others that is found only in Shadow is to option that book, as well.
Also, I wouldn't want to option the first book and then have somebody else option the sequel and come out with a competing movie. Probably wouldn't happen, but I pay for insurance even though I don't think my house will burn down.