There are certifying agencies. Including 1 for Data Processing professionals. However, most of us in the field could care less. 1 company I was with wanted to check out the tests they had. They had several senior people (I was 1) take tests in their field. The feedback was pretty consistant - the tests were not broken down into the correct brackets. They dumped the testing agency.
In another case I was required to take a "programming" exam as part of an interview process. Supposed to be generic questions without a language. I pointed out to the tester that 1 question had 2 different correct answers depending on a compile time switch in a language I was familiar with.
A couple of years ago, I got to help write a DB2 certification exam. The problem with that exam is that most people doing the actual work would do it with an open manual next to them, and IBM on the horn to answer questions, not closed book against a clock. (My assignment was 3 questions - 1 on each version of the exam). (A couple of the writers were people that then wrote study books for the very same test)
So the question of certification is who is qualified to write the tests? And how realistic are they?
Sorry, my best resume device is to list some of the things I have done to save companies money. The best 1 so far - found 1 line of code that was holding $10 million dollars of excess inventory. Close second - write a program from scratch and run it within 8 hours to avoid $4 million in IRS fines.
I was running OS/2 at the time. OS/2 had the absolute best terminal emulator available at the time. And on the NCR computers we were stuck with at work, the DOS window of OS/2 was a better behaved DOS then the DOS that came with the NCR machines. As for the "multi-tasking" of Win 3.0 - Desqview did it better, even on an 8088 machine! And finally, The CASE tool I was running would not run on Windows. (I ran Dual boot anyway).
My mom had diabetic retinopathy laser surgery. After having the lenses removed the old fashioned way years before that (scalpel, while awake). There are also effects noted for divers, so between the fears from my mom's surgeries, the potential side effects to diving, and the probable changes as my eyes age even more, it just isn't worth it.
Many classes can be done online, others are done in clusters - brought to your town on evenings and weekends. You may have to do capstone on campus (for my MBA it was one week long class in Ft Lauderdale). So you save up vacation for the capstone... (I saved vacation, then my boss gave me the week as a training week - great boss).
I hear Webster is geared on the same model, but don't have the actual knowledge of them - you may want to investigate.
Agree with Phoenix being scam school. I actually looked into teaching for them once.... Not enough knowledge of DeVry to state about them.
Junior year we had the new DEC PDP-8e. Single platter disk drive Mini. Took BASIC course that year. Next year they offered the advanced course for the first time. Took that. Senior year took third at the state math fair with a game program. Paper tape backup (still have some) Studied some of the assembler, and was one of a handful of students allowed to boot toggle the machine.
Today Database Adminsitrator for a fortune 10 company, BSCS, MBA, have spoken at an international conference several times.
Also, in 8th grade we did one section in programming in the advanced math class - by punched cards - Fortran
Between sophmore and jr years in HS actually did a short session of a couple weeks and programmed for the US government (fortran).
Learned programming more from my Dad (he had been in the field since about 1961)
Here here. Agile is nothing more than a rehash of what we called prototyping back in the late 80s / early 90s. You didn't think there was anything new under the sun did you?
The big problerm with Agile, the way it is practiced, is that you push 3 times as much rework on your DBAs and other support personal. Tell me - who costs more - a DBA or a developer?
Agile proponenets never facter in the higher costs of the support staff, since they are "already there". But what does it cost to extend your support staff when they are overloaded? Where do you get those scarce people as well?
I paid full retail for my first photoshop (version 2.2) back in the day (1994). MS Office? 10$ for a fully licensed version thru my employer (That's professional version, including access and powerpoint).
OS - XP professional came with the machine, I would have to spend a lot of time to replace it, and it WOULD NOT RUN a piece of software on the machine that my company paid 1200$ for.
So, what would Linux cost to implement? No way to tell, because it can not do the job. So once again, the premise is faulty to start with. Linux is not a complete solution.
They go on and on about a series of awards - given out for various accomplishments. And the "low" turnover last year. Well sure, they cut our salary, but we stayed anyway to keep from becoming unemployed --- that's your low turnover.
But the company across the street came in 11 places ahead of us? Are the people that created this list insane? The place across the way doesn't pay well, but talks about big bonuses in their writeup. Then they go on about them paying for tuition for people - my question is where are the people going to college? The closest acredited school is 30 miles away and doesn't do much at night. All we have locally is community colleges and a couple of non-accredited "universities".
I have already put the new lights into almost all of my home lighting now. Eventually, all but ONE light will be replaced. That one 5 bulb chandelier REQUIRES 1 incadescent bulb in order to turn on correctly. The other 4 bulbs are the lower power lighting. They are a smattering of other bulbs still as incadescents, but as they burn out they are getting replaced. (Or as the one required incadescent burns out, I use one of those others to replace it and swap it for one of the low power ones.)
And before you get on with the "oh they have special bulbs for that" - tried them - they don't work.
Vector and such math is good if you want to go graphics and the like.
Algorithms and Automata theory is good if you want to go the Database administration route.
You pays your money and makes your choice.
As for Mathmaticians making the best programmers - sounds like a mathmatician talking to me. It ain't neccessarily so.
I chose the automata route myself, and I employed as a DBA for a fortune 10 company. However, with todays DBMSes, you might want to get some statistics under your belt.
I was one of a team of 3 that wrote a system in COBOL in 1983. Last I heard it is still running. It generated Maintenance schedules for a large plant automatically.
The next system I worked on after that (1985-88) was running until the company sold the division that used it. Don't know what happened after that.
Code from 1996-7 is still running for a tax system for an insurance company.
Code from 1999-2000 is still ordering merchandise for a major entertainment company (A certain Mouse you know).
And if you send packages by certain LARGE corporations then you use COBOL behind the scences. I wrote a new COBOL program for one of those a few weeks ago (and I'm a DBA, not a developer).
Define "multitasking" so that people are bound to fail, then measure the failure.
I define multitasking to include doing more then one task on my computer at a time. The trick is to start a long running BACKGROUND task and then do something requiring more attention in the foreground. It works very well.
So, I call this study INCOMPLETE. the peole doing it were probably playing video games while measuring their data - LOL!
Ok, I have somewhere at home, DOS 3.3 on a 720K floppy (And on the hard drive). AND --- AND ----- a working external 360K floppy on the same machine. This is an old Toshiba T1200, running an 8088 with 640K. I think I might have some old 360K garbage floppies around too, though I would have to look for them. I fire this beast up once a year or so, because it still does one thing the newer machines can't....RAW editting of a file on the disk hex bit by hex bit - the really old Norton Utilities....
Got this old machine new in 1988, then got a $100 class action suite return on it YEARS later.
And yes, I would like to see a 5.25" USB floppy somewhere too, just for grins and for a couple of old programs.
I also still have another machine that has a 1/2 height dual drive (5.25" 1.2 MB and 3.5" 1.4MB drive) and a tape drive and a CD drive..... And it is on my home LAN, so I can acces sit from the other machines.
First, some states have the emissions checks done by private enterprises (CT for one). And then you get states like Florida, that do not do an Emissions check at all. In fact, there is no check of any car in Florida that would involve looking at the odometer.
The I4 corridor is inconsistant. There are places where the pay is good, and places where it is bad. I work along that cooridor and have for the last 20 years. Maybe you aren't looking hard enough.
>The first patent looks kind of interesting, inasmuch as it seems like they are applying it to a database, and I know of no database that actually does a single query in parallel, but I'm not sure it would be any more efficient, because there is only one disk. Having two threads isn't going to speed anything up there, and might actually cause the disk to thrash.
Hm, you obivously never heard of either Teradata or DB/2? I worked as a Teradata DBA as early as 1988 (version 2.0 of the Teradata Operating System). DB/2 has had automatic parallel processing of partitioned tablespaces at least since version 7. That's just two DBMSes I can name.
Obviously, there is plenty of prior art out there, and these patents should be rejsected immediately, and Micrsoft is not going to fight IBM over this.
Toshiba T1200 Laptop - DOS 3.3, 640K memory, 20MB hard drive, 1200 baud modem (that was an option), monochrome screen. My first laptop and it still ran last time I fired it up - last year. Everything older then that went to the public schools at some point.
"By the way, when you copy a file across a file system, from one drive to another, it gets a new creation time, so if all the files were "created" on a single day, that was when they were migrated over."
Not on a Windows system it doesn't. The only time you get a new date on it is when you download from an external system, or you manually change the date/time stamp.
Now me? All my music files (all legal, btw) are already on a USB portable drive anyway, because it takes 15GB off the active drive I need the space on. And my wife's machine? Re-loaded with WIN XP PRO over the top of WIN XP Home about a month ago. Memory chip went bad, and garbled part of the registry - right after I got a full backup of the files.....
So, how are we going to certify Forensics experts? Obviously the Anonymous Coward above wants to be one, but certainly doesn't qualify, if he makes such a basic mistake. (And to double check, I tried it just before I posted this message. Copied a file to another dirve and it retains the 2008 creation date).
This same bit of rhetoric happens ever time there is a downturn in the IT economy. It never happens the way it is predicted because coding ends up being harder then the authors think.
As for Agile - another fad, this too shall pass. (We called it prototyping last time around and it failed then too.)
>I am not entirely sure what you are saying? Do you not recall Bush? The tool that gave Angela Merkel (the prime minister of Germany) a back massage at a meeting? How about the time he winked at the Queen of England? Or when he addressed a room full of donors by saying something to the effect of: "Quite an impressive room of people here, the haves, and the have mores...". The same guy who got us involved in two wars and ushered in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
As for the two wars - right you are, and WHO was attacked first? And we were attacked because a previous weakling of a president let things go for too long - Clinton.... As for who brought in this economic downfall, look no further than the Democrats. Barney Frank, Bill Clinton and even all the way back to Jimmy Carter are the ones who did this to us. Bush tried to head it off several years ago and was stopped by Pelosi, Reid and Barney Frank.
>And YOU have the gall to call Obama a "clown of a president" who needs to be impeached? Seriously? If you were marked troll, I would have let your comments go and not even read your post. The fact that somehow, you ended up listed as insightful absolutely astounds me. Given the stark contrast of character between the two men, a grass roots community organizer vs. a man who shirked his military duties, you must need a wheelbarrow to carry your balls around in.
As for the crack about shirking his duties. Shows where your sour grapes are. George Bush served his time honorably and has the paperwork to prove it. Where was Obama? Won't even produce his proper birth certificate to prove that he actually is a Native born American!
Obama has no character, associate of terrorists that he is. No experience doing anything --- and it shows. He is in contention for worst president of all time - after how many days? As for 4 or 8 years. Don't be ton him getting re-elected. He has shown so many characteristics of a one term president already. And Congress will probably swing back to the GOP in 2010, after PElosi and Reid are shown for the buffoons they are.
>Finally, as a general rule, anyone who finds a need to use the term "class" in the same context you did in your post typically has none themselves.
It goes to show the lack of class in the man and his administration. The two gifts mentioned from the British were classy gifts, and were well thought out.
The gifts from the Obama administration don't have a clue what class is.
Expect more of the same until we impeach and fire this clown of a president.
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There are certifying agencies. Including 1 for Data Processing professionals. However, most of us in the field could care less. 1 company I was with wanted to check out the tests they had. They had several senior people (I was 1) take tests in their field. The feedback was pretty consistant - the tests were not broken down into the correct brackets. They dumped the testing agency.
In another case I was required to take a "programming" exam as part of an interview process. Supposed to be generic questions without a language. I pointed out to the tester that 1 question had 2 different correct answers depending on a compile time switch in a language I was familiar with.
A couple of years ago, I got to help write a DB2 certification exam. The problem with that exam is that most people doing the actual work would do it with an open manual next to them, and IBM on the horn to answer questions, not closed book against a clock. (My assignment was 3 questions - 1 on each version of the exam). (A couple of the writers were people that then wrote study books for the very same test)
So the question of certification is who is qualified to write the tests? And how realistic are they?
Sorry, my best resume device is to list some of the things I have done to save companies money. The best 1 so far - found 1 line of code that was holding $10 million dollars of excess inventory. Close second - write a program from scratch and run it within 8 hours to avoid $4 million in IRS fines.
I was running OS/2 at the time. OS/2 had the absolute best terminal emulator available at the time. And on the NCR computers we were stuck with at work, the DOS window of OS/2 was a better behaved DOS then the DOS that came with the NCR machines. As for the "multi-tasking" of Win 3.0 - Desqview did it better, even on an 8088 machine! And finally, The CASE tool I was running would not run on Windows. (I ran Dual boot anyway).
My mom had diabetic retinopathy laser surgery. After having the lenses removed the old fashioned way years before that (scalpel, while awake). There are also effects noted for divers, so between the fears from my mom's surgeries, the potential side effects to diving, and the probable changes as my eyes age even more, it just isn't worth it.
just doesn't taste right to me....
Many classes can be done online, others are done in clusters - brought to your town on evenings and weekends. You may have to do capstone on campus (for my MBA it was one week long class in Ft Lauderdale). So you save up vacation for the capstone... (I saved vacation, then my boss gave me the week as a training week - great boss).
I hear Webster is geared on the same model, but don't have the actual knowledge of them - you may want to investigate.
Agree with Phoenix being scam school. I actually looked into teaching for them once.... Not enough knowledge of DeVry to state about them.
Junior year we had the new DEC PDP-8e. Single platter disk drive Mini. Took BASIC course that year. Next year they offered the advanced course for the first time. Took that. Senior year took third at the state math fair with a game program. Paper tape backup (still have some) Studied some of the assembler, and was one of a handful of students allowed to boot toggle the machine.
Today Database Adminsitrator for a fortune 10 company, BSCS, MBA, have spoken at an international conference several times.
Also, in 8th grade we did one section in programming in the advanced math class - by punched cards - Fortran
Between sophmore and jr years in HS actually did a short session of a couple weeks and programmed for the US government (fortran).
Learned programming more from my Dad (he had been in the field since about 1961)
Early TRS -80 in the house in 1977
Here here. Agile is nothing more than a rehash of what we called prototyping back in the late 80s / early 90s. You didn't think there was anything new under the sun did you?
The big problerm with Agile, the way it is practiced, is that you push 3 times as much rework on your DBAs and other support personal. Tell me - who costs more - a DBA or a developer?
Agile proponenets never facter in the higher costs of the support staff, since they are "already there". But what does it cost to extend your support staff when they are overloaded? Where do you get those scarce people as well?
I paid full retail for my first photoshop (version 2.2) back in the day (1994). MS Office? 10$ for a fully licensed version thru my employer (That's professional version, including access and powerpoint).
OS - XP professional came with the machine, I would have to spend a lot of time to replace it, and it WOULD NOT RUN a piece of software on the machine that my company paid 1200$ for.
So, what would Linux cost to implement? No way to tell, because it can not do the job. So once again, the premise is faulty to start with. Linux is not a complete solution.
They go on and on about a series of awards - given out for various accomplishments. And the "low" turnover last year. Well sure, they cut our salary, but we stayed anyway to keep from becoming unemployed --- that's your low turnover.
But the company across the street came in 11 places ahead of us? Are the people that created this list insane? The place across the way doesn't pay well, but talks about big bonuses in their writeup. Then they go on about them paying for tuition for people - my question is where are the people going to college? The closest acredited school is 30 miles away and doesn't do much at night. All we have locally is community colleges and a couple of non-accredited "universities".
And you are so wrong. It is a simple problem.
I have already put the new lights into almost all of my home lighting now. Eventually, all but ONE light will be replaced. That one 5 bulb chandelier REQUIRES 1 incadescent bulb in order to turn on correctly. The other 4 bulbs are the lower power lighting. They are a smattering of other bulbs still as incadescents, but as they burn out they are getting replaced. (Or as the one required incadescent burns out, I use one of those others to replace it and swap it for one of the low power ones.)
And before you get on with the "oh they have special bulbs for that" - tried them - they don't work.
So, GE, please keep manufacturing incadescents.
Vector and such math is good if you want to go graphics and the like.
Algorithms and Automata theory is good if you want to go the Database administration route.
You pays your money and makes your choice.
As for Mathmaticians making the best programmers - sounds like a mathmatician talking to me. It ain't neccessarily so.
I chose the automata route myself, and I employed as a DBA for a fortune 10 company. However, with todays DBMSes, you might want to get some statistics under your belt.
I was one of a team of 3 that wrote a system in COBOL in 1983. Last I heard it is still running. It generated Maintenance schedules for a large plant automatically.
The next system I worked on after that (1985-88) was running until the company sold the division that used it. Don't know what happened after that.
Code from 1996-7 is still running for a tax system for an insurance company.
Code from 1999-2000 is still ordering merchandise for a major entertainment company (A certain Mouse you know).
And if you send packages by certain LARGE corporations then you use COBOL behind the scences. I wrote a new COBOL program for one of those a few weeks ago (and I'm a DBA, not a developer).
Do you ship anything? Say with Fedex, UPS, or any of the other big shipping companies? Congratualtions, you have just created COBOL transactions.
Define "multitasking" so that people are bound to fail, then measure the failure.
I define multitasking to include doing more then one task on my computer at a time. The trick is to start a long running BACKGROUND task and then do something requiring more attention in the foreground. It works very well.
So, I call this study INCOMPLETE. the peole doing it were probably playing video games while measuring their data - LOL!
Ok, I have somewhere at home, DOS 3.3 on a 720K floppy (And on the hard drive). AND --- AND ----- a working external 360K floppy on the same machine. This is an old Toshiba T1200, running an 8088 with 640K. I think I might have some old 360K garbage floppies around too, though I would have to look for them. I fire this beast up once a year or so, because it still does one thing the newer machines can't....RAW editting of a file on the disk hex bit by hex bit - the really old Norton Utilities....
Got this old machine new in 1988, then got a $100 class action suite return on it YEARS later.
And yes, I would like to see a 5.25" USB floppy somewhere too, just for grins and for a couple of old programs.
I also still have another machine that has a 1/2 height dual drive (5.25" 1.2 MB and 3.5" 1.4MB drive) and a tape drive and a CD drive..... And it is on my home LAN, so I can acces sit from the other machines.
First, some states have the emissions checks done by private enterprises (CT for one). And then you get states like Florida, that do not do an Emissions check at all. In fact, there is no check of any car in Florida that would involve looking at the odometer.
Oops....
The I4 corridor is inconsistant. There are places where the pay is good, and places where it is bad. I work along
that cooridor and have for the last 20 years. Maybe you aren't looking hard enough.
fp
>The first patent looks kind of interesting, inasmuch as it seems like they are applying it to a database, and I know of no database that actually does a single query in parallel, but I'm not sure it would be any more efficient, because there is only one disk. Having two threads isn't going to speed anything up there, and might actually cause the disk to thrash.
Hm, you obivously never heard of either Teradata or DB/2? I worked as a Teradata DBA as early as 1988
(version 2.0 of the Teradata Operating System). DB/2 has had automatic parallel processing of
partitioned tablespaces at least since version 7. That's just two DBMSes I can name.
Obviously, there is plenty of prior art out there, and these patents should be rejsected immediately, and Micrsoft is not going to fight
IBM over this.
Toshiba T1200 Laptop - DOS 3.3, 640K memory, 20MB hard drive, 1200 baud modem (that was an option), monochrome screen. My first
laptop and it still ran last time I fired it up - last year. Everything older then that went to the public schools at some point.
"By the way, when you copy a file across a file system, from one drive to another, it gets a new creation time, so if all the files were "created" on a single day, that was when they were migrated over."
Not on a Windows system it doesn't. The only time you get a new date on it is when you download from an external system, or you manually change the date/time stamp.
Now me? All my music files (all legal, btw) are already on a USB portable drive anyway, because it takes 15GB off the active drive I need the space on. And my wife's machine? Re-loaded with WIN XP PRO over the top of WIN XP Home about a month ago. Memory chip went bad, and garbled part of the registry - right after I got a full backup of the files.....
So, how are we going to certify Forensics experts? Obviously the Anonymous Coward above wants to be one, but certainly doesn't qualify, if he makes such a basic mistake. (And to double check, I tried it just before I posted this message. Copied a file to another dirve and it retains the 2008 creation date).
This same bit of rhetoric happens ever time there is a downturn in the IT economy. It never happens the way it is predicted because coding ends up being harder then the authors think.
As for Agile - another fad, this too shall pass. (We called it prototyping last time around and it failed then too.)
>I am not entirely sure what you are saying? Do you not recall Bush? The tool that gave Angela Merkel (the prime minister of Germany) a back massage at a meeting? How about the time he winked at the Queen of England? Or when he addressed a room full of donors by saying something to the effect of: "Quite an impressive room of people here, the haves, and the have mores...". The same guy who got us involved in two wars and ushered in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
As for the two wars - right you are, and WHO was attacked first? And we were attacked because a previous weakling of a president let things go for too long - Clinton .... As for who brought in this economic downfall, look no further than the Democrats. Barney Frank, Bill Clinton and even all the way back to Jimmy Carter are the ones who did this to us. Bush tried to head it off several years ago and was stopped by Pelosi, Reid and Barney Frank.
>And YOU have the gall to call Obama a "clown of a president" who needs to be impeached? Seriously? If you were marked troll, I would have let your comments go and not even read your post. The fact that somehow, you ended up listed as insightful absolutely astounds me. Given the stark contrast of character between the two men, a grass roots community organizer vs. a man who shirked his military duties, you must need a wheelbarrow to carry your balls around in.
As for the crack about shirking his duties. Shows where your sour grapes are. George Bush served his time honorably and has the paperwork to prove it. Where was Obama? Won't even produce his proper birth certificate to prove that he actually is a Native born American!
Obama has no character, associate of terrorists that he is. No experience doing anything --- and it shows. He is in contention for worst president of all time - after how many days? As for 4 or 8 years. Don't be ton him getting re-elected. He has shown so many characteristics of a one term president already. And Congress will probably swing back to the GOP in 2010, after PElosi and Reid are shown for the buffoons they are.
>Finally, as a general rule, anyone who finds a need to use the term "class" in the same context you did in your post typically has none themselves.
We see now why you don't have any mod points.
It goes to show the lack of class in the man and his administration. The two gifts mentioned from the British were classy gifts, and were well thought out.
The gifts from the Obama administration don't have a clue what class is.
Expect more of the same until we impeach and fire this clown of a president.
So, at what point do you cut off low 6 digit UID?