The issue here is that there have been times when all the candidates insult your intelligence and I refuse to vote for any candidate in certain races. I have done this many times since I started voting. I find it very hard to chose the lesser of two evils although I have voted against a particular person or issue at times. A none of the above choice would be a clear indication of that and prevent shenanigans by lawyers to turn my 'Hell NO!' vote into a vote for their side like they are trying to do now.
It was people deciding to vote 'None of the above' because of the foul dirty campaigns waged by both candidates. I didn't vote for either one of them either. I do agree a paper trail is a good idea though. It's funny how where the Democrats won, and sometimes by slim margins, the losing candidate stepped aside. When the Democrat Jennings lost they are crying that the machines did them in. Can't have it both ways whiners. The only real solution to this whole mess is to add a 'None of the above' to the list. I'd punch that as many times as registering a vote.
And by SP2 all the older Office apps will be crippled forcing an upgrade to the Vista Office suite. Just think of the billions of dollars taken out of the world wide economy that could have been spent on REAL business improvements.
A company I worked for was taken over by CA. The CA accounting office routinely screwed up the expense reports of the consultants. They are into my knickers for over $3,000 in unpaid expenses. I feel this was due to orders from the top, Chuck Wang and Sanjay Kumar. One of the standard topics of former CA consultants was how much they had been taken for. This routine works because CA, like all corporations, forces employees to take a credit card as a personal card and to pay expenses out of pocket if the expense report isn't paid. Another employer got me for over $10,000 because the 'computer lost the reports'. I finally got some of it because I racked down the hotel receipts and refiled the reports, some of them three times.
As a former broadcaster and a licensed amateur radio operator I know there is a legal route these 'Freedom Fighters' could take if they weren't so busy making martyrs of themselves. There is a community broadcast for education license that can be had for next to nothing if not for free. It is for the FM broadcast band and is for limited power but that power with a decent antenna can cover a square mile or so. Equipment is cheap and you could put up a group for coverage.
The airwaves are a community resource. The FCC was created to control and parcel out the use of the radio spectrum for the best use by the community. Having said that, I know that big money is now involved in braodcast and frequency allocation - amateurs are having to fight off big money interests all the time. However the possibility to cause harm with poorly made and engineered equipment is more likely to create anger than sympathy.
If these people want a voice, take it to the internet. Streaming audio and video using the same studio equipment is possible and if the message has validity the word will spread. The technology is mature and anyone with broadband can do it. It's not as dramatic as getting arrrested and fined and your 'cause' getting press time I guess.
Looks to me like these losers need to learn new marketing techniques, not whine about ebay. If you have a product that used to sell in two listings and now it takes four you need to ask yourself is there more competition? Better copy writers for the same products? Better prices from other sellers? Fewer buyers for the product?
These people need to put more effort into selling rather than blame someone else for their shortcomings.
I went to college at 38 while making a major career change into IT. And this was mostly to get credits for what I had already taught myself. Now as a silver back I am a very well paid SW architect.
The short answer is that you will be as successful in a career change to the extent of your motivation, natural talent, and some amount of luck. Choose an evolving area of interest and stay current, aggressively so. I got to where I am by being a generalist - knowing and doing a little something with everything in computers from building boards with wirewrap, designing and wiring networks,to hacking in a couple dozen langauges from 8080/Z80 ASM to mainframe COBOL. Some of my peers are specialists and are just as successful. That is the luck part.
So pick something you really like and attack it like a tasmanian devil.
I've found in my own experience that taking consulting lobs (Dogbert: combines conning people with insulting people) and constantly upgrading skills have been a path to higher pay. Road warrior when I've had to be. If you wnat stability, hone your brown nose and political skills and hunker down for a long climb up and pray that no merger or Indian outsourcing company moves in. Keep lots of phone numbers and emails on hand and make sure they are up to date. Stay in touch with former employees and managers.
The definition of a great wotk invironment is subjective. Maybe try temp consulting work at first. A lot of these can turn permanent.
Good luck and thanks for standing up for your country. All us old warriors salute you and your mates.
Gomez - cold war sub vet and sonarman to the stars.
As I have said many times before here at/., Gates and M$ finds something someone else is doing that is profitable then move in and suck all the oxygen out of the space and leave nothing but corpses behind. They engineer the same features and embed it into the fabric of Windows making it supposedly impossible to remove without 'breaking' Windows(tm). Then they pay huge sums to lawyers to trample any complaints and life goes on with the masses cooing and drooling over 'new' features and eye candy as they are force marched into ever more restrictive (and expensive) licensing structures and hardware requirements.
/OpenBSD - Damn secure. Tighter than a grouper's sphincter at 10 fathoms. //FreeBSD - pretty damn secure ///NetBSD - also pretty damn secure All Free as in beer and speech.
Greg Leahy writes one of the finest *IX books ever and now it's free. Highly recommended. I got my first copy with FreeBSD 2.2 in it. I learned more about UNIX in one place from the book that anywhere else.
As a long ago submarine sonarman I think this has some potential but the noise we tracked was caused by cavitation of the screws and at least a minor difference in one screw blade. I don't see how this technology would stop that. Cavitation noise reduction requires extremely expensive processes to make the prop very balanced and smooth. But as with anything else under stress the physical shape would be altered and making tracking and turn counting easier. I served on a sub outfitted as a killer sub. A sub that tracked other submarines and we had all the best technology available in the 50s. to reduce noise and our job was to keep the noise level down at all times. It will be worth watching for the civilian application of this.
In the ocean there are two types of vessels. Submarines and targets.
I'm sure that many here are still ranting about the last two Florida election results for president. I'd like to confuse you with a few facts. In the state of Florda elections are run by the counties. Autonomously. Period. The local boards purchase, maintain, and configure the machines for each election. Theresa LePore is a Democrat and one of the most inept of all local election supervisors in the state. Palm Beach county is overwhelmingly Democrat which is why she is still there mucking things up. And why the Democrats selected her county in 2000 as being one of the Democrat supervised elections that were vulnerable to election counting problems. All the election results in southern Florida that came under fire were in Democrat controlled counties. Do you think that if Jeb Bush had tried to intervene before hand that there would not have been Hell to pay? Grown up.
The Supervisor of Elections here in Hillsborough County at the time was Pam Iorio. Also a Democrat, but she ran such a tight ship that no recount would have shown any changes. I voted for Pam Iorio every election that she was in. She was very good at her job and brooked no political shenanigans and she was elected time after time by a vast majority. I cannot vote for her now since she is Tampa mayor and I am in the county.
I think that if I were a Democrat in southern FLorida I would have been insulted as hell by Al Gore and his lawyers and the national Democratic Party who came in and declared everything done by the local Democrats to have been faulty and fraudulent. That old retired Demcrats were too stupid and senile to understand the Democrat designed ballot. That the local Democrat election comittee did not maintain the machines correctly so that the chad was correctly removed. That the local Democrats purchased faulty machines or ones that were too difficult to use correctly. And to have the national press pointing it all out to the world. Just saying.
you might consider a career at RadioShack selling cell phones. However the answer to your question is: DESIGN (Requirements Doc), DESIGN (High Level Design doc and Test Plan), DESIGN (Detail Design doc). CODE. Then TEST, TEST, TEST, TEST and RETEST. After that's done. then TEST some more.
Get customer signoff at every stage of design so as to have a stable target. Nothing screws with stability more than a customer/client who is allowed to change the requirements on the fly. Following this pattern I've designed and built communications servers for credit card authorizations and N-tiered communication servers for claims submissions that ran error free for five or more years. But in C and UNIX or DOS - never Winblows. Or C++. But the design,code,test 'till you puke paradigm will work all the same.
But also Bill Gates is due his $300 - $400 dollars for a computer operating system and a full office suite (plus anti-virus software) she should be using. What a thoughtless woman. She and her kind are resposibible for holding back the economy. Think of the starving Chinese children turning out computer boards and peripherals that are being denied their daily bowl of rice. Oh, the humanilty! Think of all those pimple faced kids in their first job at the local appliance stores being deprived of ales. And the ISPs not getting their share.
What a shame. This woman and her kind are criminals. Let's round them up and send them all to re-education camps and force feed them computer classes until they change their anti-social behaviors.
And whatever it's called, too many companies turn spineless for money. In recent years look at how many canpanies are still being called to task for participation in slavery and with the Nazis. I hope that sometime in the future all these companies are brought to judgement for the same sort of activities in China.
It can be both. In fact many socialist countries are police states. Far left wing or far right wing governments are extremes and either can be a police state. That's how they stay in power.
Here's a link that MAY enlighten those who wish to learn rather than just rant against the HAM radio operator. The ranks of HAM radio still provides one of the largest pools of technical savvy and engineering skills yet. Enjoy your electronic toys? The entire beginning (and continuation) of electronic investigation began with many HAMS. http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2005/08/01/1/
In this story the author explains the technical issues and how they are being addressed to prevent the noise pollution from the Cheap And Dirty(tm) BPL service and using better technology to let everyone get what they want.
(a) Digital Audio Recording Devices.--
(1) Amount of payment.-- The royalty payment due under section 1003 for each digital audio recording device imported into and distributed in the United States, or manufactured and distributed in the United States, shall be 2 percent of the transfer price. Only the first person to manufacture and distribute or import and distribute such device shall be required to pay the royalty with respect to such device.
(2) Calculation for devices distributed with other devices.-- With respect to a digital audio recording device first distributed in combination with one or more devices, either as a physically integrated unit or as separate components, the royalty payment shall be calculated as follows:
(A) If the digital audio recording device and such other devices are part of a physically integrated unit, the royalty payment shall be based on the transfer price of the unit, but shall be reduced by any royalty payment made on any digital audio recording device included within the unit that was not first distributed in combination with the unit.
(B) If the digital audio recording device is not part of a physically integrated unit and substantially similar devices have been distributed separately at any time during the preceding 4 calendar quarters, the royalty payment shall be based on the average transfer price of such devices during those 4 quarters.
(C) If the digital audio recording device is not part of a physically integrated unit and substantially similar devices have not been distributed separately at any time during the preceding 4 calendar quarters, the royalty payment shall be based on a constructed price reflecting the proportional value of such device to the combination as a whole.
(3) Limits on royalties.-- Notwithstanding paragraph (1) or (2), the amount of the royalty payment for each digital audio recording device shall not be less than $1 nor more than the royalty maximum. The royalty maximum shall be $8 per device, except that in the case of a physically integrated unit containing more than 1 digital audio recording device, the royalty maximum for such unit shall be $12. During the 6th year after the effective date of this chapter, and not more than once each year thereafter, any interested copyright party may petition the Librarian of Congress to increase the royalty maximum and, if more than 20 percent of the royalty payments are at the relevant royalty maximum, the Librarian of Congress shall prospectively increase such royalty maximum with the goal of having no more than 10 percent of such payments at the new royalty maximum; however the amount of any such increase as a percentage of the royalty maximum shall in no event exceed the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index during the period under review.
(b) Digital Audio Recording Media.-- The royalty payment due under section 1003 for each digital audio recording medium imported into and distributed in the United States, or manufactured and distributed in the United States, shall be 3 percent of the transfer price. Only the first person to manufacture and distribute or import and distribute such medium shall be required to pay the royalty with respect to such medium.
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As an amateur radio operator I welcome our DX Overlords. Actually I plan to be one - DXCC - WAZ - 5BWAS on QRP. HI HI.
Backup early - backup often.
The issue here is that there have been times when all the candidates insult your intelligence and I refuse to vote for any candidate in certain races. I have done this many times since I started voting. I find it very hard to chose the lesser of two evils although I have voted against a particular person or issue at times. A none of the above choice would be a clear indication of that and prevent shenanigans by lawyers to turn my 'Hell NO!' vote into a vote for their side like they are trying to do now.
It was people deciding to vote 'None of the above' because of the foul dirty campaigns waged by both candidates. I didn't vote for either one of them either. I do agree a paper trail is a good idea though.
It's funny how where the Democrats won, and sometimes by slim margins, the losing candidate stepped aside. When the Democrat Jennings lost they are crying that the machines did them in. Can't have it both ways whiners.
The only real solution to this whole mess is to add a 'None of the above' to the list. I'd punch that as many times as registering a vote.
Registered Liberterian - Practicing None-of-the-abovian
And by SP2 all the older Office apps will be crippled forcing an upgrade to the Vista Office suite. Just think of the billions of dollars taken out of the world wide economy that could have been spent on REAL business improvements.
A company I worked for was taken over by CA. The CA accounting office routinely screwed up the expense reports of the consultants. They are into my knickers for over $3,000 in unpaid expenses. I feel this was due to orders from the top, Chuck Wang and Sanjay Kumar. One of the standard topics of former CA consultants was how much they had been taken for. This routine works because CA, like all corporations, forces employees to take a credit card as a personal card and to pay expenses out of pocket if the expense report isn't paid. Another employer got me for over $10,000 because the 'computer lost the reports'. I finally got some of it because I racked down the hotel receipts and refiled the reports, some of them three times.
Read 'Darwin's Radio' and 'Darwin's Children' on how a virus in the human genome gets reactivated and causes havoc. This cannot end well.
The airwaves are a community resource. The FCC was created to control and parcel out the use of the radio spectrum for the best use by the community. Having said that, I know that big money is now involved in braodcast and frequency allocation - amateurs are having to fight off big money interests all the time. However the possibility to cause harm with poorly made and engineered equipment is more likely to create anger than sympathy.
If these people want a voice, take it to the internet. Streaming audio and video using the same studio equipment is possible and if the message has validity the word will spread. The technology is mature and anyone with broadband can do it. It's not as dramatic as getting arrrested and fined and your 'cause' getting press time I guess.
These people need to put more effort into selling rather than blame someone else for their shortcomings.
I went to college at 38 while making a major career change into IT. And this was mostly to get credits for what I had already taught myself. Now as a silver back I am a very well paid SW architect.
The short answer is that you will be as successful in a career change to the extent of your motivation, natural talent, and some amount of luck. Choose an evolving area of interest and stay current, aggressively so. I got to where I am by being a generalist - knowing and doing a little something with everything in computers from building boards with wirewrap, designing and wiring networks,to hacking in a couple dozen langauges from 8080/Z80 ASM to mainframe COBOL. Some of my peers are specialists and are just as successful. That is the luck part.
So pick something you really like and attack it like a tasmanian devil.
If anyone knows about criminal activities for fun and profit it'd have to be CA.
I've found in my own experience that taking consulting lobs (Dogbert: combines conning people with insulting people) and constantly upgrading skills have been a path to higher pay. Road warrior when I've had to be. If you wnat stability, hone your brown nose and political skills and hunker down for a long climb up and pray that no merger or Indian outsourcing company moves in. Keep lots of phone numbers and emails on hand and make sure they are up to date. Stay in touch with former employees and managers. The definition of a great wotk invironment is subjective. Maybe try temp consulting work at first. A lot of these can turn permanent. Good luck and thanks for standing up for your country. All us old warriors salute you and your mates. Gomez - cold war sub vet and sonarman to the stars.
As I have said many times before here at /., Gates and M$ finds something someone else is doing that is profitable then move in and suck all the oxygen out of the space and leave nothing but corpses behind. They engineer the same features and embed it into the fabric of Windows making it supposedly impossible to remove without 'breaking' Windows(tm). Then they pay huge sums to lawyers to trample any complaints and life goes on with the masses cooing and drooling over 'new' features and eye candy as they are force marched into ever more restrictive (and expensive) licensing structures and hardware requirements.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD have live distros. Don't know about NetBSD. Google is your friend.
All Free as in beer and speech.
Greg Leahy writes one of the finest *IX books ever and now it's free. Highly recommended. I got my first copy with FreeBSD 2.2 in it. I learned more about UNIX in one place from the book that anywhere else.
In the ocean there are two types of vessels. Submarines and targets.
In the state of Florda elections are run by the counties. Autonomously. Period. The local boards purchase, maintain, and configure the machines for each election. Theresa LePore is a Democrat and one of the most inept of all local election supervisors in the state. Palm Beach county is overwhelmingly Democrat which is why she is still there mucking things up. And why the Democrats selected her county in 2000 as being one of the Democrat supervised elections that were vulnerable to election counting problems. All the election results in southern Florida that came under fire were in Democrat controlled counties. Do you think that if Jeb Bush had tried to intervene before hand that there would not have been Hell to pay? Grown up.
The Supervisor of Elections here in Hillsborough County at the time was Pam Iorio. Also a Democrat, but she ran such a tight ship that no recount would have shown any changes. I voted for Pam Iorio every election that she was in. She was very good at her job and brooked no political shenanigans and she was elected time after time by a vast majority. I cannot vote for her now since she is Tampa mayor and I am in the county.
I think that if I were a Democrat in southern FLorida I would have been insulted as hell by Al Gore and his lawyers and the national Democratic Party who came in and declared everything done by the local Democrats to have been faulty and fraudulent. That old retired Demcrats were too stupid and senile to understand the Democrat designed ballot. That the local Democrat election comittee did not maintain the machines correctly so that the chad was correctly removed. That the local Democrats purchased faulty machines or ones that were too difficult to use correctly. And to have the national press pointing it all out to the world. Just saying.
However the answer to your question is: DESIGN (Requirements Doc), DESIGN (High Level Design doc and Test Plan), DESIGN (Detail Design doc). CODE. Then TEST, TEST, TEST, TEST and RETEST. After that's done. then TEST some more.
Get customer signoff at every stage of design so as to have a stable target. Nothing screws with stability more than a customer/client who is allowed to change the requirements on the fly.
Following this pattern I've designed and built communications servers for credit card authorizations and N-tiered communication servers for claims submissions that ran error free for five or more years. But in C and UNIX or DOS - never Winblows. Or C++. But the design,code,test 'till you puke paradigm will work all the same.
Good Luck.
But also Bill Gates is due his $300 - $400 dollars for a computer operating system and a full office suite (plus anti-virus software) she should be using. What a thoughtless woman. She and her kind are resposibible for holding back the economy. Think of the starving Chinese children turning out computer boards and peripherals that are being denied their daily bowl of rice. Oh, the humanilty! Think of all those pimple faced kids in their first job at the local appliance stores being deprived of ales. And the ISPs not getting their share.
What a shame. This woman and her kind are criminals. Let's round them up and send them all to re-education camps and force feed them computer classes until they change their anti-social behaviors.
And whatever it's called, too many companies turn spineless for money. In recent years look at how many canpanies are still being called to task for participation in slavery and with the Nazis. I hope that sometime in the future all these companies are brought to judgement for the same sort of activities in China.
It can be both. In fact many socialist countries are police states. Far left wing or far right wing governments are extremes and either can be a police state. That's how they stay in power.
This is great news for astronomy. I just hope they keep an eye out for the Bronson Bodies with their new toy.
Here's a link that MAY enlighten those who wish to learn rather than just rant against the HAM radio operator. The ranks of HAM radio still provides one of the largest pools of technical savvy and engineering skills yet. Enjoy your electronic toys? The entire beginning (and continuation) of electronic investigation began with many HAMS.
http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2005/08/01/1/
In this story the author explains the technical issues and how they are being addressed to prevent the noise pollution from the Cheap And Dirty(tm) BPL service and using better technology to let everyone get what they want.
http://netsecurity.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.ht m?zi=1/XJ&sdn=netsecurity&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww4.law .cornell.edu%2Fuscode%2F17%2F1004.html
(a) Digital Audio Recording Devices.-- (1) Amount of payment.-- The royalty payment due under section 1003 for each digital audio recording device imported into and distributed in the United States, or manufactured and distributed in the United States, shall be 2 percent of the transfer price. Only the first person to manufacture and distribute or import and distribute such device shall be required to pay the royalty with respect to such device. (2) Calculation for devices distributed with other devices.-- With respect to a digital audio recording device first distributed in combination with one or more devices, either as a physically integrated unit or as separate components, the royalty payment shall be calculated as follows: (A) If the digital audio recording device and such other devices are part of a physically integrated unit, the royalty payment shall be based on the transfer price of the unit, but shall be reduced by any royalty payment made on any digital audio recording device included within the unit that was not first distributed in combination with the unit. (B) If the digital audio recording device is not part of a physically integrated unit and substantially similar devices have been distributed separately at any time during the preceding 4 calendar quarters, the royalty payment shall be based on the average transfer price of such devices during those 4 quarters. (C) If the digital audio recording device is not part of a physically integrated unit and substantially similar devices have not been distributed separately at any time during the preceding 4 calendar quarters, the royalty payment shall be based on a constructed price reflecting the proportional value of such device to the combination as a whole. (3) Limits on royalties.-- Notwithstanding paragraph (1) or (2), the amount of the royalty payment for each digital audio recording device shall not be less than $1 nor more than the royalty maximum. The royalty maximum shall be $8 per device, except that in the case of a physically integrated unit containing more than 1 digital audio recording device, the royalty maximum for such unit shall be $12. During the 6th year after the effective date of this chapter, and not more than once each year thereafter, any interested copyright party may petition the Librarian of Congress to increase the royalty maximum and, if more than 20 percent of the royalty payments are at the relevant royalty maximum, the Librarian of Congress shall prospectively increase such royalty maximum with the goal of having no more than 10 percent of such payments at the new royalty maximum; however the amount of any such increase as a percentage of the royalty maximum shall in no event exceed the percentage increase in the Consumer Price Index during the period under review. (b) Digital Audio Recording Media.-- The royalty payment due under section 1003 for each digital audio recording medium imported into and distributed in the United States, or manufactured and distributed in the United States, shall be 3 percent of the transfer price. Only the first person to manufacture and distribute or import and distribute such medium shall be required to pay the royalty with respect to such medium.