> In theory, it's like what happens when you take
> a cat, and strap a piece of toast to its back,
> buttered-side up. Wrap some wires and magnets
> around it and launch it into low-earth orbit.
> As long as there's carpet on the floor of the
> spacecraft, the cat will spin and generate
> power indefinitely. You can do this with less
> than six pounds of butter per year.
If you don't look in the spacecraft, is the cat alive or dead?
> The InNOut Burger's drive through often snakes through the parking lot
Please let the rest of us know where there are InNOuts where the drive thru does not snake through the parking lot at lunch time. We want directions, latitude, longitude, whatever. Pictures would be nice, too - 'cause I don't believe one exists.
PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days.
PDFs aren't "static" either. There are a variety of tools for a programmer to use to create dynamic PDFs (iText (Java), PDFlib (PHP), blah blah. You can google)
What PDFs give a programmer is a consistent - protected, read only and printable - display for forms. Be it forms which are blank; forms with the input fields enabled; or forms where some programmer has taken the time to query for the form values and prefilled out the form. I can't guarantee that some browser will print out my HTML page form; I can say with 99.9% certainity that a browser will print out my PDF form exactly the way it looks on my printer. As much as we say we're going paperless, I'd say we're creating more forms as a result of computers.
That said, I think Adobe sucks. But I love PDF. I wish everyone didn't think Adobe = PDF. (Smart move on their part to continue to offer a free PDF reader and keep PDF=Adobe in everyone's mind. And eliminating the drive for everyone to install an Open Source alternative)
The important piece of this to the states is not where you were when you worked, but where the company did business. If the company's business operations are in their state and you contributed to the business operations in that state, then that state is going to examine what was done and may lay a claim to your wages. However, if you can document that the company paying you has business operations in the state you are in and that you worked for those business operations, then you pay income tax to the state you are in.
First example: if you work for Company Y and Company Y sends you to Texas to install a computer system, Texas does not have the ability to claim any of your wages because the majority of the business operations for Company Y are in the state Company Y does business. Texas makes up for it by charging sales tax.
Second example: (personal) While living and working in Colorado, I made a point of working in the satellite office of a company that was located in Indiana, even though the project I was working on was run out of (and paid out of) the Indiana office. Because it was a real office owned by the same parent organization, because I made a point of having a desk and a phone in that office even though I was a W2 contractor, and because that office had similar business operations, Colorado claimed my wages, and Indiana could not.
One of the issues facing contractors - those of you who are truly self-employed and paid 1099 as I used to be - is that you need to make a concerted effort to have a physical office space and to do the majority of your work out of that office. You need to document the hours spent in that office, etc. Then (as most of you know), you avoid the taxation issue where two states contend for your wages.
One of the problems facing contractors is that many are being forced to work for companies by going to "approved vendors" as W2 employees. This is the same problem facing those who telecommute.
If you're paid W2, live in state A, but the business operations are in state B - well, this NY ruling sets a dangerous precendent (and NY is not alone in going after these situations) Even though you physically are located in another state, the company that is paying you as a W2 does not have or pay for a physical office space in your state and does not have any business operations in your state. As a result, the state can rule that you owe them income taxes as the deciding factor is not where you were but where the business paying you operated. The precedent is "we, the state (or city) have created an atmosphere for this business to exist and operate within our state's boundaries, therefore you owe us income tax on any wages earned while doing work for the business operations located within our limits." The issue being that the state you live in wants its cut too.
Note: areas that border - and someone bought up Cincinnati, which borders Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky - often have agreements which allow someone who lives in one state but works in another state to only pay taxes in the state in which they live. These agreements date to the times when people could only travel so far in one day in order to work.
Basically, US state tax law has not yet taken into account the ability people have to telecommute. Contact your legislator and get them working on it. Not that they care much, but maybe you can find someone to champion the issue.
> There is nothing added by adding a computer, but much is taken away.
I disagree.
My alma mater, rather than giving computers to the students and then washing their hands of the matter, have tightly integrated the laptops into the structure of the courses.
However, this is a private Catholic school, so things are different than public. Because the following applies:
kids who hack their computers will be booted out of the school. No exceptions.
part of the reason is expenses. Books take up room and are expensive (especially considering you have to buy new ones every two years). Workbooks for such things as labs are expensive. Paper is expensive. So they've moved a lot of that to computers. (Seeing the computer video of how to look at "pig anatomy" for the biology lab must be...interesting) That's not to say everything has moved to computer - Shakespeare, Steinbeck and such do not translate well to a computer screen.
The problem, as in business, is handing someone a tool without explaining how the tool works or putting the proper framework for the tool use in place.
I've yet to see a high level executive that didn't delegate emails and memos to a lower level assistant and either:
(a) let their executive assistant into their email account in order to send the email or
(b) send the email given to them by their assistant without reading more than the first sentence
My bigger pet peeve is coworkers who do not read past the first line because they're "in a hurry" - and then ask questions which were either addressed in the email or the question does not apply. Reading comprehension is often as piss poor as their ability to formulate a coherent reply.
> an ivy league type of degree (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.)
And not one of the schools you listed is Ivy League. I mean, I get your point and all -they're all top 20 schools in Newsweek (and any other Top! Schools! List!) - but not one is Ivy League.
For the hell of it, we'll make it a quiz:
First letters of the eight Ivy's are: B, C, C, D, H, P, P and Y.
If you want states: RI, NY, NY, NH, MA, PA, NJ and CT
And to contribute something meaningful to this thread:
- degree does not matter after 5 years of experience (and with some companies, less).
- a top notch degree will get your foot in the door when you are entry level, but you will still need experience and to kick ass on the interview
- a top notch degree does provide instant respect in interviews. But I can still lose the respect instantly if I screw up the interview or don't have experience.
- I went to a top notch school because of the kick ass education. I definitely didn't go there because of the great weather or loads of attractive women (and I was a computer geek anyway - anathema to attractive women in the late 80's/early 90's)
- many many companies are using "does the applicant have a degree or not" as a litmus test to shit can the resume. Get a degree. The market is evolving. I know many a very experienced programmer who has a problem getting hired because of the lack of a degree. Note that I do not endorse or condone this policy (I think it's stupid), but for an HR drone who has been told to get 20 applicants our of 478, degree is an easily understood reject criteria. Remember that most people in HR do not understand one tenth of what the IT manager has asked them to find in applicants; most people in HR are less than tech savvy.
Moved to Indiana from Colorado. Colorado's job market still sucks, although friends are telling me the coroner did return the body and the body may be off life support now.
Ya wanna know something? Don't regret the move. Miss skiing, but I can go visit my grandmother or my in-laws when I want the mountains. The companies here have a much more family friendly attitude; in fact the entire area is much more family oriented. As a guy with two small kids I'm happy as hell. My daughter has said to me several times she likes it here better.
Yes, there are companies that still believe people should go home at night and on weekends. Companies that believe you should take two hours off for a parent teacher conference (and, yes, you have to make the two hours up later, but they have no problem with the concept of "he's stepping out for a while") Companies that believe in vacation time. Don't get me wrong, same company is looking at outsourcing some things to India, and we're all keeping an eye on that (right now they're saying "key development stays here, no exceptions, we're not stupid enough to outsource that" but we'll wait and see)
I'm doing Java, WebSphere, blah blah - same stuff I would be doing if I was in Colorado.
PS. One of the best sushi places I've ever eaten at is here. And I lived in California for 5 years. Yeah, I don't have the selection of ethnic foods I used to have, but I have found one of everything - a good Gyro place, several Indian restaurants, etc. etc. And Denver ethnic foods sucked, quite frankly. There were more in Boulder, and scattered pockets around Denver - but you were looking at a drive of 30 minutes to an hour for some types of food, if you could find a decent restaurant.
> It might not be true for some professions, but I > always cringed when I saw science and engineering
> students selling their books back - when you start
>working, you *will* want those books to refer to.
No, you won't.
Can't think of a time any of the engineers I work with referred to a text. Most of 'em use some computerized reference or (drum roll) google.
The exception is the Big Reference Books - e.g. speeds and feeds for metal if you're manufacturing; properties of steel and concrete if you're in civil; etc. Those are all computerized, too; sometimes they're hauled off the shelf for something. They fall into the category of "reference next to dictionary or thesaurus, not "text book".
Most of an engineers job is writing reports and meetings. Maybe 10 percent of the time do you really get to do Real Engineering, and most of the time you're doing variations on The Same Thing. Almost all engineering is computerized now, and the tools contain all of the handy references (and you shouldn't be surprised about the tools being a handy reference because engineers are all about efficiency - and hauling a book around isn't efficient)
For those programmers to be out there - most of a programmers time is not figuring out a nasty algorithm. Most of the time is getting the basic framework set up (a good IDE makes that quicker, but you still need to plan the pieces out), setting up test cases, documentation and project planning. And lots and lots of meetings with the end user (small teams) or about the end user (larger teams) and use cases. Somewhere in project manager land they have a rule of thumb that "one week of coding means 3 weeks of meetings and documentation"; I've heard it also as "one day of coding means one week of meetings and documentation."
My friends and I joke about our text books. "Yeah, that was Real Useful to keep those around!"
- heck. MechE class of '91
(Dad worked for GE, Pratt and Thiokol. Nice layer of dust on his books by the time he died, but they did look real purty in that glass shelved book case when I was growing up. I never saw him get a book out of that shelf)
> Maybe because you don't want to carry around the 15 inch lcd and keyboard required to do actual work
I dunno about you, but I have several docking stations for my laptops. One at work, one at home, and (when I was a contractor) one at my customers. I can work on a laptop, but I really prefer a real keyboard and mouse.
So - to carry on the post you replied to - computers are shrinking. Pretty soon I'll be able to carry something I can plug in anywhere. I plug it in somewhere that has a monitor, keyboard, etc. - and I'm good to go. No depending on the home server being there; no hoping the network is up; and I have my computer on me (my data, my anti-virus, my firewall...)
And did you miss the cool stuff a researcher is doing with 3 or 4 pen shaped devices? (one displays a keyboard; one displays a screen on a surface; one is a hard drive; one is a CPU) It was a slashdot article which I'm too lazy to look up. (Yes, I am counting on the fact that someone will post the link)
> Yes, obviously, but then, _how come_ there are no standard protocols that fix this?
Because the target "platform" has been IE. Management knows everyone has IE, so developers are told "it must work in IE!" There ARE ways to do some of the things you talk about if you let a semi-decent Web hacker loose (trusted Java applets talking to a servlet; an ActiveX Object; etc.) - but the fact is most people are used to Web interfaces that work in IE (and the limitations of those interfaces); most people do NOT want to download something that smells like a 'fat client' layer (even if it is using an open standard and downloads from the server blah blah blah); and management does NOT want to support something that smells (to them) like a fat client.
Joel touched on the secondary problem in his article. The IE developers have been locked away for years and IE has changed not a whit for all practical purposes. Netscape imploded; plus Netscape decided to rewrite everything from scratch (hard to add new features when you are recreating all of the original features) Opera has zero foothold in the US. Mozilla/Firefox is finally stable and it does have some nice features; and (back to the grandparent post) as Joel mentioned in one of his articles - now that Firefox IS stable it will be interesting to see what happens with DHTML.
But we still have the problem that management feels that everyone everywhere has IE and IE is not changing. As others (including Joel) have noted, it is not in MicroSoft's interests to have IE change. Think about it - if you develop a good way to implement Web client where everything - your Word processor, your email, your spreadsheet - runs from the server on open standards, why would most people need Windows or need to develop client apps for Windows?
> "The Pentagon asked us to think about abrupt climate change and what its geopolitical
> implications might be. We weren't saying this is what will happen, only that it plausibly could happen."
>
> Pentagon scenario hmmm?...
No, it makes sense now!
Pentagon think tanks begin to realize the implications of global warming - an ice age. So they begin to look for areas which would be favorable to live in during an Ice Age - and they realize that the area around the Euphrates and the Tigris has been documented as being very fertile before the climate changed. So if the climate changed *back*, that would be the place to go. The area is sparsely populated now, but there is that pesky goverment in place headed by that Saddam guy (who we don't really like anyway)
So as a contigency plan in the event of an Ice Age, America takes Saddam out, and then<NO CARRIER>
> The blame for JavaScript may be laid firmly at the feet of Netscape,
>who invented it in part as a "respose" to Sun's Java.
Netscape DID invent JavaScript. They called it LiveScript. "Partly in response to SUN's Java" is inaccurate. Most people say "entirely because of Java". At the time SUN and Netscape were closely allied. SUN had just released Java. But there were problems with Java - it was considered "too hard". To make manipulating Java applets easier, Brendan Eich came up with LiveScript. Netscape later renamed LiveScript to JavaScript - a marketing decision (partly to capitalize on the buzz of Java; partly to emphasize that it was a scripting language designed to make using Java easier). JavaScript was officially released - with press releases from Netscape and SUN - December 4, 1995 (okay, I googled for that date. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04/06/js_history.html)
Little bit more history, while we're at it: remember that Java was originally intended for client side applets - not server side servlets. The whole server side thing came later.
JavaScript/LiveScript was intended to give access to page elements so that the page elements could be tied into applets. The law of unintended consequences kicked in - and developers began using JavaScript as a client side scripting language to manipulate images and document contents, not applets as intended.
Meanwhile, MicroSoft releases JScript (and VBScript for the browser). And Netscape submits JavaScript to ECMA.
All that said, there have been security issues in both Netscape and MicroSoft's implementation of JavaScript/Jscript. My personal opinion is that MicroSoft has made the issues worse with ActiveX controls, etc. Security in JavaScript has improved greatly in the past 8 years; most of today's problems can be laid firmly at the feet of bad implementation of security by the developers of the browser.
> OS Design? Fascinating, but ultimately irrelevant for 99% of coders
Bullshit.
(1) If you're a GOOD programmer than you know how various OS's are going to deal with your program; what the quirks of the architecture are; and how to deal with said quirks. If you don't understand what your program is running ON - truly understand - how the hell are you going to design something for it. And I AM a Java programmer (mostly for the Web). In my case, I have to know the quirks of BEA versus IBM versus Tomcat, what the differences are on Windows versus Linux versus Sun OS, and how Oracle SQL is different than MSSQL is different than DB2 SQL. Yeah, yeah, standards and Java are supposed to make all of that irrelevant, and the abstraction layer is supposed to make all of that go away. But it doesn't make it go away, although it makes it a lot easier to deal with.
(2) The purpose of college is to teach you to solve problems. Teaching about proper OS design is not so much about teaching you about OS's as much as it is about teaching you HOW to design and code. If you thought it was about OS's then you weren't learning the correct thing.
I'm a MechE/CS. One of the courses I took was "Jet Engine design". Brillant professor. He'd worked for Pratt and for GE. Still consulted for them regularly. I also co-oped at GE. What my prof taught in the course barely scratched the surface of engine design. But the problem solving techniques and the fact I'd seen the basics helped me a lot.
> Where are the lectures on writing code with low startup overhead? What about
> teaching people the merits of various toolkits? Accessibility? Version control theory?
First of all, the low startup overhead is a business management problem. Admittedly, any engineer does have to factor cost into their decision.
But you're still missing the point of college. It is NOT about teaching you EVERTHING. It is about teaching you enough so that you feel comfortable learning on your own.
Let's face facts - things are changing too fast for colleges to keep up on the technology (the version control or toolkit of today is usually gone in 5 years) So colleges concentrate on teaching you about critical thinking - because that is an ability you always need.
You also forgot the biggest one - in my opinion - which is effective business writing skills. I'm biased here because I'm actually MechE/CS - and before I could get my MechE degree I had to pass Senior Labs. Senior Labs was all about writing a different report - in a different style (one page memo; one page abstract; 10 page business case; 40 page full report; etc.) - every week. It was 6 credits - when most courses in the college were 3, and the rare course was 4.
> It's possible for a student to come out of a CompSci course and be unable to explain why a containment-based widget toolkit > is better than a positional one, yet can talk about VM swapping algorithms and implementing the > fastest hashtable probing all day. Which would you rather employ?
The guy who knows he's been taught HOW to think, and HOW to learn stuff on his own.
As I said - I'm a Mechanical Engineer as well as a CS major. Early on the MechE professors make it damn clear that there is no way in hell they can teach you everything about being a MechE. We're talking a field of study that has research going back hundreds of years (I have steam table books that my great-grandfather wrote when he was a MechE professor) But college CAN teach you the underlying theory and how to learn on your own how to solve problems, and give you the basic building blocks which everything is built on.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus. -Seneca
"Not for school but for life we learn."
Everyone else has already covered (and beat to death) the fact you need to know Math.
So I'll state you should also learn proper grammar in whatever language your company speaks. Because in addition to writing scads of code, you also need to WRITE DOCUMENTATION, DAMMIT. Or at least COMMENT THE CODE.
The engineering school I graduated from insisted that every senior pass a "report writing" course their senior year (in addition to the usual freshman writing and humanities courses). A different type of business/engineering report every week - and it was 6 credits in a school where most courses maxed out at 4 credits (they emphasized you must pass the course). They insisted that we would find that course immensely valuable when we graduate because, "On some days 80% of your job will be writing requirements, writing memos, writing emails, writing specs, writing documentation and NO coding."
Of all of the courses we took, I have to say that "Senior Lab" has been one of the courses that has set me apart from my peers and helped me the most.
Total aside: one of the programmers I work with didn't realize that -1*-1=+1. His code was, um, suffering as a result. Sad, ain't it?
Re:Why do we have this "grow or perish" mentality?
on
Should Sun Just Fold Now?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> The reason companies exist is to make money.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think you missed what people are looking for.
Wall Street is looking for ROI. That's it. You're in niche market which is static? Good - maximize profits and spin off dividends, lots and lots of bug fat dividends. Or provide ROI by an increasing stock price.
Micro$oft, when growing, didn't pay dividends - but was well beloved because its stock price kept increasing. Now that its stock price is no longer ballistic it is going to have to start paying a dividend (start paying out some of that billions it has as a war chest) in order to interest investors. (yes, I know, MicroSoft is doing so)
Some of the darlings of Wall Street are utility companies. They're not growing - but if run well they spin off money hand over fist. Large, consistent dividends for all. Investors love that.
There are many thousands of niche companies that aren't going anywhere (I've worked for quite a few) They aren't growing; fixed set of customers; their stock price isn't going to go ballistic; but they're *consistently* profitable.
And that is what Wall Street wants. No unpleasant surprises. Pleasant surprises are always welcome. Return on Investment.
SUN has a niche. A very profitable niche. But reality is that the niche is under assault from many sides (HP, IBM, Dell, Linux, ya name it) The niche isn't growing; the niche may be shrinking. SUN - in order to attract investment - is going to have to (a) prove that it is well protected in its niche (which is probably no, but can be debated. On one side we have WANG and DEC; on the other side we have IBM still making lots of money off of Big Iron) (b) return something, be it increasing stock price or dividend from profits, to investors.
I agree with others - people have called SUN dead before and it has made a comeback. As Andy Grove would say, SUN seems to be at an inflection point. I think what many of us are noticing is a lack of a consistent vision or plan - a lack of "THIS is what we're going to do!" Their plan seems to be more a Flavor of the Week. People at SUN may disagree, but from out here in the grandstands the perception is that y'all are doing a lot of flailing around.
There are already a lot of posts berating the
use of Excel as a database. Yet, I have not
seen a single clear argument why this is a
Bad Thing
I would berate anyone who used Excel IN PLACE OF what a database should be doing.
If you have a small team or just one person using a spreadsheet to make sense of numbers, that's fine. If you're storing numbers that many people have access to/crunch; you generate reports from those numbers and many people have access to the underlying numbers (and the code to generate the reports); or several other scenarios - you're using the wrong tool. Yes, the spreadsheet can do it - and it can work - but taking the extra time to do a DB and write code to do what you're doing through a spreadsheet will ultimately save you time and money.
Case in point 1 (spreadsheets used incorrectly): buddy of mine works for a car dealership. Someone wrote a monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet that crunches numbers and creates reports. Every time they change the report layout or the way data is calculated my buddy has to scramble around updating all of the desktops with the new spreadsheet (yes, its on a share, but he still has to scramble around to fix issues)
Case in point two (a decent use of a spreadsheet where a more complex tool could do the job): My team has an objectives list, the tasks, who the tasks are assigned to, dates, etc. in an Excel spreadsheet. "Ah ha!" you say - that's something that should be in Project or in a database.
Why?
Project is overkill for what we - the team members - do. And its damn expensive to put on each of our desks. We document the tasks (and add links to the docs as we write the docs); sometimes we split the tasks up; and we mark down when we start and complete the tasks. That's our objectives for the spreadsheet. Da boss man (project manager) takes what we have in the spreadsheet and updates Project to do time forecasting, hour tracking, etc. (project manager does stuff we don't need to do - we just want to know what the task is, where the specs are, who is doing something, has it been done, etc.) Yes, there is duplication of work (we're entering some things twice, in effect) but Project doesn't (easily) do some of what we need to do and for the rest of what we need in "task list" Project is overkill.
My job is to look at the job, decide what tools I could use, and then to use the right tool for the job. I can often use flat text files, relational databases, spreadsheets, HTML, CSS, Java, C, C++, RPG, etc. - my job is to decide (based on known requirements and based on what I think future requirements may be) what to use. I very very rarely would recommend a spreadsheet to do anything complex. It's too hard to maintain data integrity; it's too hard to maintain version control; it's just too hard to maintain in comparison to some of the other choices. It will work for one time projects or small scale. It will even work for large scale. But just because it will work doesn't mean its the best solution.
Open source development is user-driven, and not vendor-driven. Features that are demanded by users will quickly be developed without concern for any vendor's business model or revenue stream
Features that are demanded by users may be quickly developed if the developers agree that the features are needed and/or the developers find it interesting to develop them.
There's a reason why a lot of the nitty gritty features of spreadsheet software isn't in OpenOffice yet. No one who could do the coding cares enough to put it in (we'd use another tool to do what we need to do; or we look at it and go "why do you need to do that for?" because it's all flash and no substance). But the General Business User who can't quickly write a script but uses the hell out of a spreadsheet (and thinks that when they do something in a spreadsheet they've "written a program") would kill for some, say, graphing features, because the people they work with can't visualize a graph to save their life and those same people need a pretty picture to make a point.
Why is it better to pay for a support contract to use another companies geeks than your own?
Someone who knows the product - really knows the product - can fix it faster than the in house geek.
This is a variation on the first point, but there is a good chance that someone else has already seen the same problem or a similar problem. If everyone contacts a single source (the vendor), there's a good chance (if the vendor is any good) that someone either knows how to fix the problem and/or that the vendor has a fix/patch. I know I, like most of our gentle readers, google quite frequently to see who has had the same problem I'm having with, say, Linux, and what they did to fix it. But what if its (a) an obscure problem or (b) the other person didn't feel like posting his/her fix (I know I'm not alone in finding 10 people who have posted "I'm having problems with X" with no replies or solutions. You know that there is probably a fix out there, but you can't find it. Woo hoo - reinvent the wheel time!)
We're already short on people; vendor contracts hit our budget differently. My company - based on what the business has said "you must do this year" - is 100 PEOPLE short. They're hiring for some of the projects (but the projects are going to be automatically behind due to ramp up time); they're postponing other projects; and they're using contractors for other projects (which comes with its own set of management headaches) To support software would mean you'd need someone on staff, pay their salaries and benefits, and schedule them in such a way that they're "available" if something goes wrong (which means you use them the rest of the time how?).
Look at a support contract as an insurance contract - you're paying someone else to make sure things work. And you're paying them to keep the staff (claims adjusters, to carry my pathetic analogy) available so that if you do have a problem the problem is fixed quickly.
Do you really want to work for a place that cares where you went to school more than if you can do the job?
I went to a very highly ranked school. It's probably in the top 20 (again). I went there because I loved the profs; I loved the campus; I loved the school. Yeah, the degree helps me get jobs a little (people get that look in their eye when they find out where I went) but what matters more is the results of how I apply the education. I know lots of idiots from highly ranked schools, and some of them were my classmates. What matters to people now is that I get my projects done on time, correctly, and within deadline. I think my education helps, but I could have easily gotten an equivalent education from State U and I know it. My brother is a Phd from a state school and no one really cares where his degree came from - they care about the results of his research (he's private company, not professor)
So look at Rose-Hulman (Indiana); check out University of Cincinnati (it's not bad, and gets decent respect within the state of Ohio if you plan to stay there); Purdue is good (but the social aspects are rumored to suck); etc.
And then visit each campus - and make sure you either leave the parents at home or take a 24 hour break from them while there - and look at the students, talk to the profs, maybe sit in on some classes (no one will care if you listen to a lecture; but you should ask the prof or TA first if its a smaller class)
I, personally, thought everyone at Carnegie Mellon looked stressed out and that downtown Pittsburg was not where I wanted to spend several years. That's my personal opinion. I know many CMU grads who loved it there. I preferred a more rural setting.
It's 4 years of your life; and what college you went to is only going to matter when you try for grad school or for your first 2 jobs. And even then, if you interview badly no one is going to give a shit where you went to college. And if you can't do the job, no one will care what your degree is (although they may cut you some slack and consider you more redeemable if you have a shinier degree) Go the place where you think they're going to fill in the gaps in skills that you have, and always remember that you're unique and what you want/need is different than what others want/need.
Fact is, however, insurance is a much better deal when you get it through an organization than if you get it as an individual.
Actually, I get lower rates as an individual than I do if I work for a corporation because I am a healthy male in his 30's. The corporate rate includes a cost for all of the more costly coworkers. I've set up insurance for myself as an individual and set up insurance while working for a corporation.
That said, insurance is a better deal as a corporate entity because:
corporations can deduct the costs from their taxes (you can too if you set things up correctly)
corporations get better coverage depending on the state. In the state I now live in, individual coverage for my family does not cover maternity, although life saving surgery such as C-sections are covered. Beyond that, everything is covered and my coverage is equivalent to what I would get working for most corporations. Better way to say this is "if you are a female of child-bearing age you will get screwed with higher premiums and stranger restrictions." My wife's portion of the premium is 3 times mine; my kids are 80% of mine. When I was in California there was little difference between what was covered (there the state specifies that maternity is covered for all policies); and because Blue Cross knew my age and health history they could offer me a lower rate in comparison to the equivalent coverage I had when I was working for a corporation.
you are screwed if you have existing conditions (corporations have existing conditions factored into their premiums; hence their higher costs in comparison to me)
Dental insurance, however, sucks. There is no decent individual plan in any of the states I've lived in. It's cheaper to pay it out of pocket.
People have addressed the differences of 900 Mhz fairly well, but I thought I'd chime on my experience with 2.4 Ghz
First, you will have to determine what you have in your house that is at 900 Mhz. I know all 4 of my cordless phones are 900 Mhz. I know this because I was having interference on my connection (40 percent packet loss) until I found the culprit. (the culprit was my X10 camera. We moved it to the new baby's room - we use it to check on the baby without opening the door - and the new nursery was 10 feet closer to my antenna. Oops. Changing the channel didn't matter - the piece of shit causes interference across all of the channels)
Secondly, what are you going to do INSIDE your house. That's important. I have both wireless (again at 2.4 Ghz) and CAT5. Generally, I leave the wireless off; when its on, I have to be careful which of the 11 channels I use or we're back to an interference problem.
For the most part, my connection has been reliable and fairly speedy. I get 1 Mbps down at almost all time; and can pay more if I want a faster rate.
As far as security - the signal is encrypted, and after that you're dealing with your normal network security.
They're saying they're going to upgrade my area to 5.2 Ghz due to interference problems (and some days I do get random interference even though I have clear line of sight and very little around me) Some people say they have a problem with wind, but I live in a windy area (insurance companies charging extra for wind damage now. Grrrr) and have never experienced a problem.
I'm going to start with pointing out that
the first sentence of the article said "UK websites", not "US". Obviously that means the people across the Pond need to work on this.
And what a surprise that when people roll out changes sometimes things break. Oh My God. Have you cured cancer yet?
And I'd say more often than not the "problems" on Monday are caused by bug fixes that developers are rushing on to production to fix bugs that were found over the weekend. And, as we all know, sometimes bug fixes skip QA...
Seriously, most places I work have Go Live set to be Monday, or, more often, Tuesday. You go live when you have already tested it; its gone through QA; and you're sure the staff is there. Tuesday is the better date in order to deal with key people taking long weekends, and it gives you two or three days to fix issues before the next weekend. Besides, Mondays are already hellish without adding "release new version" to the list of torments.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't look in the spacecraft, is the cat alive or dead?
Please let the rest of us know where there are InNOuts where the drive thru does not snake through the parking lot at lunch time. We want directions, latitude, longitude, whatever. Pictures would be nice, too - 'cause I don't believe one exists.
PDFs aren't "static" either. There are a variety of tools for a programmer to use to create dynamic PDFs (iText (Java), PDFlib (PHP), blah blah. You can google)
What PDFs give a programmer is a consistent - protected, read only and printable - display for forms. Be it forms which are blank; forms with the input fields enabled; or forms where some programmer has taken the time to query for the form values and prefilled out the form. I can't guarantee that some browser will print out my HTML page form; I can say with 99.9% certainity that a browser will print out my PDF form exactly the way it looks on my printer. As much as we say we're going paperless, I'd say we're creating more forms as a result of computers.
That said, I think Adobe sucks. But I love PDF. I wish everyone didn't think Adobe = PDF. (Smart move on their part to continue to offer a free PDF reader and keep PDF=Adobe in everyone's mind. And eliminating the drive for everyone to install an Open Source alternative)
The important piece of this to the states is not where you were when you worked, but where the company did business. If the company's business operations are in their state and you contributed to the business operations in that state, then that state is going to examine what was done and may lay a claim to your wages. However, if you can document that the company paying you has business operations in the state you are in and that you worked for those business operations, then you pay income tax to the state you are in.
First example: if you work for Company Y and Company Y sends you to Texas to install a computer system, Texas does not have the ability to claim any of your wages because the majority of the business operations for Company Y are in the state Company Y does business. Texas makes up for it by charging sales tax.
Second example: (personal) While living and working in Colorado, I made a point of working in the satellite office of a company that was located in Indiana, even though the project I was working on was run out of (and paid out of) the Indiana office. Because it was a real office owned by the same parent organization, because I made a point of having a desk and a phone in that office even though I was a W2 contractor, and because that office had similar business operations, Colorado claimed my wages, and Indiana could not.
One of the issues facing contractors - those of you who are truly self-employed and paid 1099 as I used to be - is that you need to make a concerted effort to have a physical office space and to do the majority of your work out of that office. You need to document the hours spent in that office, etc. Then (as most of you know), you avoid the taxation issue where two states contend for your wages.
One of the problems facing contractors is that many are being forced to work for companies by going to "approved vendors" as W2 employees. This is the same problem facing those who telecommute.
If you're paid W2, live in state A, but the business operations are in state B - well, this NY ruling sets a dangerous precendent (and NY is not alone in going after these situations) Even though you physically are located in another state, the company that is paying you as a W2 does not have or pay for a physical office space in your state and does not have any business operations in your state. As a result, the state can rule that you owe them income taxes as the deciding factor is not where you were but where the business paying you operated. The precedent is "we, the state (or city) have created an atmosphere for this business to exist and operate within our state's boundaries, therefore you owe us income tax on any wages earned while doing work for the business operations located within our limits." The issue being that the state you live in wants its cut too.
Note: areas that border - and someone bought up Cincinnati, which borders Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky - often have agreements which allow someone who lives in one state but works in another state to only pay taxes in the state in which they live. These agreements date to the times when people could only travel so far in one day in order to work.
Basically, US state tax law has not yet taken into account the ability people have to telecommute. Contact your legislator and get them working on it. Not that they care much, but maybe you can find someone to champion the issue.
I disagree.
My alma mater, rather than giving computers to the students and then washing their hands of the matter, have tightly integrated the laptops into the structure of the courses.
However, this is a private Catholic school, so things are different than public. Because the following applies:
The problem, as in business, is handing someone a tool without explaining how the tool works or putting the proper framework for the tool use in place.
I've yet to see a high level executive that didn't delegate emails and memos to a lower level assistant and either:
(a) let their executive assistant into their email account in order to send the email or
(b) send the email given to them by their assistant without reading more than the first sentence
My bigger pet peeve is coworkers who do not read past the first line because they're "in a hurry" - and then ask questions which were either addressed in the email or the question does not apply. Reading comprehension is often as piss poor as their ability to formulate a coherent reply.
> an ivy league type of degree (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.)
And not one of the schools you listed is Ivy League. I mean, I get your point and all -they're all top 20 schools in Newsweek (and any other Top! Schools! List!) - but not one is Ivy League.
For the hell of it, we'll make it a quiz:
First letters of the eight Ivy's are: B, C, C, D, H, P, P and Y.
If you want states: RI, NY, NY, NH, MA, PA, NJ and CT
And to contribute something meaningful to this thread:
- degree does not matter after 5 years of experience (and with some companies, less).
- a top notch degree will get your foot in the door when you are entry level, but you will still need experience and to kick ass on the interview
- a top notch degree does provide instant respect in interviews. But I can still lose the respect instantly if I screw up the interview or don't have experience.
- I went to a top notch school because of the kick ass education. I definitely didn't go there because of the great weather or loads of attractive women (and I was a computer geek anyway - anathema to attractive women in the late 80's/early 90's)
- many many companies are using "does the applicant have a degree or not" as a litmus test to shit can the resume. Get a degree. The market is evolving. I know many a very experienced programmer who has a problem getting hired because of the lack of a degree. Note that I do not endorse or condone this policy (I think it's stupid), but for an HR drone who has been told to get 20 applicants our of 478, degree is an easily understood reject criteria. Remember that most people in HR do not understand one tenth of what the IT manager has asked them to find in applicants; most people in HR are less than tech savvy.
Moved to Indiana from Colorado. Colorado's job market still sucks, although friends are telling me the coroner did return the body and the body may be off life support now.
Ya wanna know something? Don't regret the move. Miss skiing, but I can go visit my grandmother or my in-laws when I want the mountains. The companies here have a much more family friendly attitude; in fact the entire area is much more family oriented. As a guy with two small kids I'm happy as hell. My daughter has said to me several times she likes it here better.
Yes, there are companies that still believe people should go home at night and on weekends. Companies that believe you should take two hours off for a parent teacher conference (and, yes, you have to make the two hours up later, but they have no problem with the concept of "he's stepping out for a while") Companies that believe in vacation time. Don't get me wrong, same company is looking at outsourcing some things to India, and we're all keeping an eye on that (right now they're saying "key development stays here, no exceptions, we're not stupid enough to outsource that" but we'll wait and see)
I'm doing Java, WebSphere, blah blah - same stuff I would be doing if I was in Colorado.
PS. One of the best sushi places I've ever eaten at is here. And I lived in California for 5 years. Yeah, I don't have the selection of ethnic foods I used to have, but I have found one of everything - a good Gyro place, several Indian restaurants, etc. etc. And Denver ethnic foods sucked, quite frankly. There were more in Boulder, and scattered pockets around Denver - but you were looking at a drive of 30 minutes to an hour for some types of food, if you could find a decent restaurant.
> always cringed when I saw science and engineering
> students selling their books back - when you start
>working, you *will* want those books to refer to.
No, you won't.
Can't think of a time any of the engineers I work with referred to a text. Most of 'em use some computerized reference or (drum roll) google.
The exception is the Big Reference Books - e.g. speeds and feeds for metal if you're manufacturing; properties of steel and concrete if you're in civil; etc. Those are all computerized, too; sometimes they're hauled off the shelf for something. They fall into the category of "reference next to dictionary or thesaurus, not "text book".
Most of an engineers job is writing reports and meetings. Maybe 10 percent of the time do you really get to do Real Engineering, and most of the time you're doing variations on The Same Thing. Almost all engineering is computerized now, and the tools contain all of the handy references (and you shouldn't be surprised about the tools being a handy reference because engineers are all about efficiency - and hauling a book around isn't efficient)
For those programmers to be out there - most of a programmers time is not figuring out a nasty algorithm. Most of the time is getting the basic framework set up (a good IDE makes that quicker, but you still need to plan the pieces out), setting up test cases, documentation and project planning. And lots and lots of meetings with the end user (small teams) or about the end user (larger teams) and use cases. Somewhere in project manager land they have a rule of thumb that "one week of coding means 3 weeks of meetings and documentation"; I've heard it also as "one day of coding means one week of meetings and documentation."
My friends and I joke about our text books. "Yeah, that was Real Useful to keep those around!"
- heck. MechE class of '91
(Dad worked for GE, Pratt and Thiokol. Nice layer of dust on his books by the time he died, but they did look real purty in that glass shelved book case when I was growing up. I never saw him get a book out of that shelf)
I dunno about you, but I have several docking stations for my laptops. One at work, one at home, and (when I was a contractor) one at my customers. I can work on a laptop, but I really prefer a real keyboard and mouse.
So - to carry on the post you replied to - computers are shrinking. Pretty soon I'll be able to carry something I can plug in anywhere. I plug it in somewhere that has a monitor, keyboard, etc. - and I'm good to go. No depending on the home server being there; no hoping the network is up; and I have my computer on me (my data, my anti-virus, my firewall...)
And did you miss the cool stuff a researcher is doing with 3 or 4 pen shaped devices? (one displays a keyboard; one displays a screen on a surface; one is a hard drive; one is a CPU) It was a slashdot article which I'm too lazy to look up. (Yes, I am counting on the fact that someone will post the link)
Because the target "platform" has been IE. Management knows everyone has IE, so developers are told "it must work in IE!" There ARE ways to do some of the things you talk about if you let a semi-decent Web hacker loose (trusted Java applets talking to a servlet; an ActiveX Object; etc.) - but the fact is most people are used to Web interfaces that work in IE (and the limitations of those interfaces); most people do NOT want to download something that smells like a 'fat client' layer (even if it is using an open standard and downloads from the server blah blah blah); and management does NOT want to support something that smells (to them) like a fat client.
Joel touched on the secondary problem in his article. The IE developers have been locked away for years and IE has changed not a whit for all practical purposes. Netscape imploded; plus Netscape decided to rewrite everything from scratch (hard to add new features when you are recreating all of the original features) Opera has zero foothold in the US. Mozilla/Firefox is finally stable and it does have some nice features; and (back to the grandparent post) as Joel mentioned in one of his articles - now that Firefox IS stable it will be interesting to see what happens with DHTML.
But we still have the problem that management feels that everyone everywhere has IE and IE is not changing. As others (including Joel) have noted, it is not in MicroSoft's interests to have IE change. Think about it - if you develop a good way to implement Web client where everything - your Word processor, your email, your spreadsheet - runs from the server on open standards, why would most people need Windows or need to develop client apps for Windows?
> implications might be. We weren't saying this is what will happen, only that it plausibly could happen." >
> Pentagon scenario hmmm?...
No, it makes sense now!
Pentagon think tanks begin to realize the implications of global warming - an ice age. So they begin to look for areas which would be favorable to live in during an Ice Age - and they realize that the area around the Euphrates and the Tigris has been documented as being very fertile before the climate changed. So if the climate changed *back*, that would be the place to go. The area is sparsely populated now, but there is that pesky goverment in place headed by that Saddam guy (who we don't really like anyway) So as a contigency plan in the event of an Ice Age, America takes Saddam out, and then<NO CARRIER>
Charles Cooper over at CNet disagrees with you regarding Carly. See http://news.com.com/Why+dis+Fiorina%3F/2010-1042_3 -5217314.html Also see http://news.com.com/Why+Carly's+been+dissed/2009-1 081_3-5217913.html where someone else comments (in regard to the Cooper article) that Carly is gaining respect in some circles for what she has done.
I'll also note this article regarding HP profits which is also on CNet: http://news.com.com/HP+reports+profit+growth%2C+ra ises+sales+forecast/2100-1003_3-5215328.html
Nothing like record profits to help the old image.
I realize Carly comes across as a bitch to some, but as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out regarding what she has done.
> The blame for JavaScript may be laid firmly at the feet of Netscape,
>who invented it in part as a "respose" to Sun's Java.
Netscape DID invent JavaScript. They called it LiveScript. "Partly in response to SUN's Java" is inaccurate. Most people say "entirely because of Java". At the time SUN and Netscape were closely allied. SUN had just released Java. But there were problems with Java - it was considered "too hard". To make manipulating Java applets easier, Brendan Eich came up with LiveScript. Netscape later renamed LiveScript to JavaScript - a marketing decision (partly to capitalize on the buzz of Java; partly to emphasize that it was a scripting language designed to make using Java easier). JavaScript was officially released - with press releases from Netscape and SUN - December 4, 1995 (okay, I googled for that date. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04 /06/js_history.html)
Little bit more history, while we're at it: remember that Java was originally intended for client side applets - not server side servlets. The whole server side thing came later.
JavaScript/LiveScript was intended to give access to page elements so that the page elements could be tied into applets. The law of unintended consequences kicked in - and developers began using JavaScript as a client side scripting language to manipulate images and document contents, not applets as intended.
Meanwhile, MicroSoft releases JScript (and VBScript for the browser). And Netscape submits JavaScript to ECMA.
All that said, there have been security issues in both Netscape and MicroSoft's implementation of JavaScript/Jscript. My personal opinion is that MicroSoft has made the issues worse with ActiveX controls, etc. Security in JavaScript has improved greatly in the past 8 years; most of today's problems can be laid firmly at the feet of bad implementation of security by the developers of the browser.
Bullshit.
(1) If you're a GOOD programmer than you know how various OS's are going to deal with your program; what the quirks of the architecture are; and how to deal with said quirks. If you don't understand what your program is running ON - truly understand - how the hell are you going to design something for it. And I AM a Java programmer (mostly for the Web). In my case, I have to know the quirks of BEA versus IBM versus Tomcat, what the differences are on Windows versus Linux versus Sun OS, and how Oracle SQL is different than MSSQL is different than DB2 SQL. Yeah, yeah, standards and Java are supposed to make all of that irrelevant, and the abstraction layer is supposed to make all of that go away. But it doesn't make it go away, although it makes it a lot easier to deal with.
(2) The purpose of college is to teach you to solve problems. Teaching about proper OS design is not so much about teaching you about OS's as much as it is about teaching you HOW to design and code. If you thought it was about OS's then you weren't learning the correct thing.
I'm a MechE/CS. One of the courses I took was "Jet Engine design". Brillant professor. He'd worked for Pratt and for GE. Still consulted for them regularly. I also co-oped at GE. What my prof taught in the course barely scratched the surface of engine design. But the problem solving techniques and the fact I'd seen the basics helped me a lot.
> Where are the lectures on writing code with low startup overhead? What about
> teaching people the merits of various toolkits? Accessibility? Version control theory?
First of all, the low startup overhead is a business management problem. Admittedly, any engineer does have to factor cost into their decision.
But you're still missing the point of college. It is NOT about teaching you EVERTHING. It is about teaching you enough so that you feel comfortable learning on your own.
Let's face facts - things are changing too fast for colleges to keep up on the technology (the version control or toolkit of today is usually gone in 5 years) So colleges concentrate on teaching you about critical thinking - because that is an ability you always need.
You also forgot the biggest one - in my opinion - which is effective business writing skills. I'm biased here because I'm actually MechE/CS - and before I could get my MechE degree I had to pass Senior Labs. Senior Labs was all about writing a different report - in a different style (one page memo; one page abstract; 10 page business case; 40 page full report; etc.) - every week. It was 6 credits - when most courses in the college were 3, and the rare course was 4.
> It's possible for a student to come out of a CompSci course and be unable to explain why a containment-based widget toolkit
> is better than a positional one, yet can talk about VM swapping algorithms and implementing the
> fastest hashtable probing all day. Which would you rather employ?
The guy who knows he's been taught HOW to think, and HOW to learn stuff on his own.
As I said - I'm a Mechanical Engineer as well as a CS major. Early on the MechE professors make it damn clear that there is no way in hell they can teach you everything about being a MechE. We're talking a field of study that has research going back hundreds of years (I have steam table books that my great-grandfather wrote when he was a MechE professor) But college CAN teach you the underlying theory and how to learn on your own how to solve problems, and give you the basic building blocks which everything is built on.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus. -Seneca
"Not for school but for life we learn."
So I'll state you should also learn proper grammar in whatever language your company speaks. Because in addition to writing scads of code, you also need to WRITE DOCUMENTATION, DAMMIT. Or at least COMMENT THE CODE.
The engineering school I graduated from insisted that every senior pass a "report writing" course their senior year (in addition to the usual freshman writing and humanities courses). A different type of business/engineering report every week - and it was 6 credits in a school where most courses maxed out at 4 credits (they emphasized you must pass the course). They insisted that we would find that course immensely valuable when we graduate because, "On some days 80% of your job will be writing requirements, writing memos, writing emails, writing specs, writing documentation and NO coding."
Of all of the courses we took, I have to say that "Senior Lab" has been one of the courses that has set me apart from my peers and helped me the most.
Total aside: one of the programmers I work with didn't realize that -1*-1=+1. His code was, um, suffering as a result. Sad, ain't it?
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I think you missed what people are looking for.
Wall Street is looking for ROI. That's it. You're in niche market which is static? Good - maximize profits and spin off dividends, lots and lots of bug fat dividends. Or provide ROI by an increasing stock price.
Micro$oft, when growing, didn't pay dividends - but was well beloved because its stock price kept increasing. Now that its stock price is no longer ballistic it is going to have to start paying a dividend (start paying out some of that billions it has as a war chest) in order to interest investors. (yes, I know, MicroSoft is doing so)
Some of the darlings of Wall Street are utility companies. They're not growing - but if run well they spin off money hand over fist. Large, consistent dividends for all. Investors love that.
There are many thousands of niche companies that aren't going anywhere (I've worked for quite a few) They aren't growing; fixed set of customers; their stock price isn't going to go ballistic; but they're *consistently* profitable.
And that is what Wall Street wants. No unpleasant surprises. Pleasant surprises are always welcome. Return on Investment.
SUN has a niche. A very profitable niche. But reality is that the niche is under assault from many sides (HP, IBM, Dell, Linux, ya name it) The niche isn't growing; the niche may be shrinking. SUN - in order to attract investment - is going to have to (a) prove that it is well protected in its niche (which is probably no, but can be debated. On one side we have WANG and DEC; on the other side we have IBM still making lots of money off of Big Iron) (b) return something, be it increasing stock price or dividend from profits, to investors.
I agree with others - people have called SUN dead before and it has made a comeback. As Andy Grove would say, SUN seems to be at an inflection point. I think what many of us are noticing is a lack of a consistent vision or plan - a lack of "THIS is what we're going to do!" Their plan seems to be more a Flavor of the Week. People at SUN may disagree, but from out here in the grandstands the perception is that y'all are doing a lot of flailing around.
I would berate anyone who used Excel IN PLACE OF what a database should be doing.
If you have a small team or just one person using a spreadsheet to make sense of numbers, that's fine. If you're storing numbers that many people have access to/crunch; you generate reports from those numbers and many people have access to the underlying numbers (and the code to generate the reports); or several other scenarios - you're using the wrong tool. Yes, the spreadsheet can do it - and it can work - but taking the extra time to do a DB and write code to do what you're doing through a spreadsheet will ultimately save you time and money.
Case in point 1 (spreadsheets used incorrectly): buddy of mine works for a car dealership. Someone wrote a monstrosity of an Excel spreadsheet that crunches numbers and creates reports. Every time they change the report layout or the way data is calculated my buddy has to scramble around updating all of the desktops with the new spreadsheet (yes, its on a share, but he still has to scramble around to fix issues)
Case in point two (a decent use of a spreadsheet where a more complex tool could do the job): My team has an objectives list, the tasks, who the tasks are assigned to, dates, etc. in an Excel spreadsheet. "Ah ha!" you say - that's something that should be in Project or in a database.
Why?
Project is overkill for what we - the team members - do. And its damn expensive to put on each of our desks. We document the tasks (and add links to the docs as we write the docs); sometimes we split the tasks up; and we mark down when we start and complete the tasks. That's our objectives for the spreadsheet. Da boss man (project manager) takes what we have in the spreadsheet and updates Project to do time forecasting, hour tracking, etc. (project manager does stuff we don't need to do - we just want to know what the task is, where the specs are, who is doing something, has it been done, etc.) Yes, there is duplication of work (we're entering some things twice, in effect) but Project doesn't (easily) do some of what we need to do and for the rest of what we need in "task list" Project is overkill.
My job is to look at the job, decide what tools I could use, and then to use the right tool for the job. I can often use flat text files, relational databases, spreadsheets, HTML, CSS, Java, C, C++, RPG, etc. - my job is to decide (based on known requirements and based on what I think future requirements may be) what to use. I very very rarely would recommend a spreadsheet to do anything complex. It's too hard to maintain data integrity; it's too hard to maintain version control; it's just too hard to maintain in comparison to some of the other choices. It will work for one time projects or small scale. It will even work for large scale. But just because it will work doesn't mean its the best solution.
Features that are demanded by users may be quickly developed if the developers agree that the features are needed and/or the developers find it interesting to develop them.
There's a reason why a lot of the nitty gritty features of spreadsheet software isn't in OpenOffice yet. No one who could do the coding cares enough to put it in (we'd use another tool to do what we need to do; or we look at it and go "why do you need to do that for?" because it's all flash and no substance). But the General Business User who can't quickly write a script but uses the hell out of a spreadsheet (and thinks that when they do something in a spreadsheet they've "written a program") would kill for some, say, graphing features, because the people they work with can't visualize a graph to save their life and those same people need a pretty picture to make a point.
- Someone who knows the product - really knows the product - can fix it faster than the in house geek.
- This is a variation on the first point, but there is a good chance that someone else has already seen the same problem or a similar problem. If everyone contacts a single source (the vendor), there's a good chance (if the vendor is any good) that someone either knows how to fix the problem and/or that the vendor has a fix/patch. I know I, like most of our gentle readers, google quite frequently to see who has had the same problem I'm having with, say, Linux, and what they did to fix it. But what if its (a) an obscure problem or (b) the other person didn't feel like posting his/her fix (I know I'm not alone in finding 10 people who have posted "I'm having problems with X" with no replies or solutions. You know that there is probably a fix out there, but you can't find it. Woo hoo - reinvent the wheel time!)
- We're already short on people; vendor contracts hit our budget differently. My company - based on what the business has said "you must do this year" - is 100 PEOPLE short. They're hiring for some of the projects (but the projects are going to be automatically behind due to ramp up time); they're postponing other projects; and they're using contractors for other projects (which comes with its own set of management headaches) To support software would mean you'd need someone on staff, pay their salaries and benefits, and schedule them in such a way that they're "available" if something goes wrong (which means you use them the rest of the time how?).
Look at a support contract as an insurance contract - you're paying someone else to make sure things work. And you're paying them to keep the staff (claims adjusters, to carry my pathetic analogy) available so that if you do have a problem the problem is fixed quickly.Do you really want to work for a place that cares where you went to school more than if you can do the job?
I went to a very highly ranked school. It's probably in the top 20 (again). I went there because I loved the profs; I loved the campus; I loved the school. Yeah, the degree helps me get jobs a little (people get that look in their eye when they find out where I went) but what matters more is the results of how I apply the education. I know lots of idiots from highly ranked schools, and some of them were my classmates. What matters to people now is that I get my projects done on time, correctly, and within deadline. I think my education helps, but I could have easily gotten an equivalent education from State U and I know it. My brother is a Phd from a state school and no one really cares where his degree came from - they care about the results of his research (he's private company, not professor)
So look at Rose-Hulman (Indiana); check out University of Cincinnati (it's not bad, and gets decent respect within the state of Ohio if you plan to stay there); Purdue is good (but the social aspects are rumored to suck); etc.
And then visit each campus - and make sure you either leave the parents at home or take a 24 hour break from them while there - and look at the students, talk to the profs, maybe sit in on some classes (no one will care if you listen to a lecture; but you should ask the prof or TA first if its a smaller class)
I, personally, thought everyone at Carnegie Mellon looked stressed out and that downtown Pittsburg was not where I wanted to spend several years. That's my personal opinion. I know many CMU grads who loved it there. I preferred a more rural setting.
It's 4 years of your life; and what college you went to is only going to matter when you try for grad school or for your first 2 jobs. And even then, if you interview badly no one is going to give a shit where you went to college. And if you can't do the job, no one will care what your degree is (although they may cut you some slack and consider you more redeemable if you have a shinier degree) Go the place where you think they're going to fill in the gaps in skills that you have, and always remember that you're unique and what you want/need is different than what others want/need.
Actually, I get lower rates as an individual than I do if I work for a corporation because I am a healthy male in his 30's. The corporate rate includes a cost for all of the more costly coworkers. I've set up insurance for myself as an individual and set up insurance while working for a corporation.
That said, insurance is a better deal as a corporate entity because:
corporations can deduct the costs from their taxes (you can too if you set things up correctly)
corporations get better coverage depending on the state. In the state I now live in, individual coverage for my family does not cover maternity, although life saving surgery such as C-sections are covered. Beyond that, everything is covered and my coverage is equivalent to what I would get working for most corporations. Better way to say this is "if you are a female of child-bearing age you will get screwed with higher premiums and stranger restrictions." My wife's portion of the premium is 3 times mine; my kids are 80% of mine. When I was in California there was little difference between what was covered (there the state specifies that maternity is covered for all policies); and because Blue Cross knew my age and health history they could offer me a lower rate in comparison to the equivalent coverage I had when I was working for a corporation.
you are screwed if you have existing conditions (corporations have existing conditions factored into their premiums; hence their higher costs in comparison to me)
Dental insurance, however, sucks. There is no decent individual plan in any of the states I've lived in. It's cheaper to pay it out of pocket.
People have addressed the differences of 900 Mhz fairly well, but I thought I'd chime on my experience with 2.4 Ghz
First, you will have to determine what you have in your house that is at 900 Mhz. I know all 4 of my cordless phones are 900 Mhz. I know this because I was having interference on my connection (40 percent packet loss) until I found the culprit. (the culprit was my X10 camera. We moved it to the new baby's room - we use it to check on the baby without opening the door - and the new nursery was 10 feet closer to my antenna. Oops. Changing the channel didn't matter - the piece of shit causes interference across all of the channels)
Secondly, what are you going to do INSIDE your house. That's important. I have both wireless (again at 2.4 Ghz) and CAT5. Generally, I leave the wireless off; when its on, I have to be careful which of the 11 channels I use or we're back to an interference problem.
For the most part, my connection has been reliable and fairly speedy. I get 1 Mbps down at almost all time; and can pay more if I want a faster rate.
As far as security - the signal is encrypted, and after that you're dealing with your normal network security.
They're saying they're going to upgrade my area to 5.2 Ghz due to interference problems (and some days I do get random interference even though I have clear line of sight and very little around me) Some people say they have a problem with wind, but I live in a windy area (insurance companies charging extra for wind damage now. Grrrr) and have never experienced a problem.
I'm going to start with pointing out that the first sentence of the article said "UK websites", not "US". Obviously that means the people across the Pond need to work on this.
And what a surprise that when people roll out changes sometimes things break. Oh My God. Have you cured cancer yet?
And I'd say more often than not the "problems" on Monday are caused by bug fixes that developers are rushing on to production to fix bugs that were found over the weekend. And, as we all know, sometimes bug fixes skip QA...
Seriously, most places I work have Go Live set to be Monday, or, more often, Tuesday. You go live when you have already tested it; its gone through QA; and you're sure the staff is there. Tuesday is the better date in order to deal with key people taking long weekends, and it gives you two or three days to fix issues before the next weekend. Besides, Mondays are already hellish without adding "release new version" to the list of torments.
Tying everything together: Niven's Ask Slashdot and the Ask Slashdot article are geeks influenced by Science Fiction
Now we just need to add in MicroSoft and Linux and we've covered most of the articles for the last year.