The Computers Merit Badge Phanplet, available at any Scout shop nation wide. You can drop some of it, but it has a lot of good stuff in it for your task.
And if you are going to do a history, don't start with the internet, get some paper tape, some punched cards, and some old floppy disks (8", 5.25" and 3.5") to show how far we have come over the years.
That's a bit more extreme than what I did, but good. I wrote a package and they owned it. (Even done of my own time, but I put the 7 interesting subprograms in the public domain, so I had what needed for other projects.) After I transfered to another group in the company, I got called a couple times for help adding new features to it. After I was laid off, I told them the next time they called - $75 an hour, 2 hour minimum. I was working as a consultant for a competitor... Never heard from them again.
10 years ago, Kodak published an article abuot film only being 10-15% of what it can be THEN.
Lens resolution peaked in the 1970's. All improvements since then have been in usability. In fact, in consumer cameras, resolution has gone BACKWARDS since the 1970's due to cost considerations, and that the lenses were better than the film at the time.
Oh, and with the scanner I have, I get over 20 MP. And at that the film has more resolution I can't get out of it.
Oh, and for hand held stuff, lighter is WORSE, not better.
35mm dead? Not by a long shot. The difference is that I don't need to buy anything but film anymore. I have my lenses from 24mm thru 2023mm and I have my multiple camera bodies (warrentied for MY LIFETIME). I need a new battery every ten YEARS or so.
For my underwater, besides film, I do need batteries a trifle more often (every year or so) and for the strobe, all of the use regular AAs or that I can get NIMHs for.
Finally, on all but one camera, the batteries control only flash and meter. If the batteries die, I can still shoot outdoors with a trained eye.
I was just accessing a 10 year old Kodak Photo disc this last week. Read it in my current machine with no trouble at all. (The disc was dated by Kodak as 10/96 for the second roll of film on it.) I have a couple more that are as much as 12 years old and have had no trouble yet.
I am a DBA and a DA. I have lost track of the number of languages, dialects of languages, and DBMSes I have learned and used over the years. But, I set my sights on the DBA position years ago, and here I am.
I can outperform the youngsters on almost any day of the week, both in quality and quantity. Many times I write code that in turn writes code. I write code that performs edits over and over, thus freeing me from the scut work. Who do you think all these younger coders come to when they can't get their programs to work?
And anyone that tells you COBOL is dead, better think again. COBOL will bury us, not the other way around. Even as a DBA, I had occasion to write a COBOL program just last month. It will become a shop standard next week, and ALL the developers will be using it.
As for the years gone by. I got a BSCS in 1981. I have been in the field ever since. Right now, I am working for a Fortune 500 company. ($1 Billion a year in revenue.) I have worked for both large and small companies, and to tell you the truth, I like the larger ones for some things, and the smaller for others. This place is a little of each, and I have been here 5.5 years. At various times, I used punched cards, and paper tape. I remember working on a machine with 4K of usable memory. My current laptop is orders of magnitude more powerful than the first mainframe I worked on.
Oh, and my father retired from this business 10 years ago, after 30+ years in IT.
When the company needs something done now, and needs it done right, who do you think they turn to?
I once had a company come to me at 9am, and request a validation program for an IRS tape to run in Production that very night. When it did, they avoided $4 Million in fines from the IRS.
HA, NCR hardware makes Windows look like a perfect choice. I had an NCR machine once. I had to reload the OS 27 times over the first year, as the mother board was swapped out 7 times, the power supply 3 times, the hard drive twice, the floppy cable once (damaged by the tech fixing the Hard drive). The BIOS was "upgraded" 7 times. The backup device never did work. (Oh, and it wasn't a Windows or a DOS box either!) I was the guiena pig they used to try out the fixes to the problems. In another building a couple of miles away, they ended up swapping out parts of over 100 boxes for the same problems.
Given the choice, I'll take a Windows box with hardware by someone other than NCR over an NCR box EVERY time.
Too bad you don't pay attention. While I bought this latest machine with XP Pro installed (and it certainly wasn't as much as $100), I'll let that go and tell you that thru my employer I got Office 2003 Professional for 45$. Thats including Access and Powerpoint. And these are full registered versions. Anyone that pays full retail is a fool, and is soon parted from their money.
>Get a development database, a testing database and production database. Yes, you need all three.
Depending on the shop size, you might need more than that. Our current plan calls for 5, and that might not be enough.
>Have a naming standard for database tables. This will make your life SOOOO much easier.
And rule one of this standard is that no table, nor any column in any table may use a reserved word as a name. Trust me on this one, it will make your life SOOOO much easier.
Sorry, that is an invalid statement, as you do not have the authority to change to that ID. And since the ID you mentioned DOESN'T EXIST, I guess it didn't work as well.
And you don't have the password to log on with the ID that DOES exist.
I have worked in quite a few companies and not once has anyone short of management levels had a locking office. Suck it up and get a life.
Myself? I am not a network admin, I am the DA and a DBA for a fortune 500. I can not only reach all the data in the company, I can change it. Your silly little network passwords are no good unless *I* grant you database access.
This is a website maintained by the University of Oregon that details all the SCAM online Universities for you. So, this is important to check out first, before you spend any money online.
Also, having checked them out, I consider University of Phoenix a lousy University, as their teaching methods are suspect for technical degrees. I found that out when I interviewed as a teacher with them.
Gee, and I thought my raise was BAD this year, but accepted it because I was also picking up an extra week's vacation on that very day as part of the bennie for finishing 5 years with the company. All that and a competitive raise too! Woohoo!
Oh, and I wrote my first COBOL program in 5 years this week too. (being a DBA means not having to write code all the time....) This program was worth it though. It will allow a change in the rules and no more middle of the night calls to just run an SPUFI for a programmer against production.
A good text book on Automata theory and finate state machines is the one by Zamir Bavel. University of Kansas was where he was teaching when he wrote it.
Multiple communications methods. For the blood meters, 1 is RS-232 and the other is USB. I then have software (since this is one company) that meshes it together for me to extract, and then put into a form to e-mail to the doc. Thru the RS-232 port, I did write an add-on that syncs the meter to atomic time via the PC clock.
As for the blood pressure meter, I just got that, and it uses a USB link. The internal is a XML database, and I haven't done mush with it yet (jsut got it about a week ago).
As for what goes on inside, I have some specs for the RS-232 versions. I also have the password for the Access database (I cracked it and gave it back to the vendor, who didn't have it as they farmed out development). As for the USB connection, that is the Handspring. I tried to get specs on that. Good luck.
As for the Dive computer. Mine uses RS-232. The protocal has been documented by several people(thru trial and error), and there is a Linux version in the works, but it isn't very pretty yet. Meanwhile, I have the file format from the downloaded file dechiphered. I then wrote a program to format that and send it to a special doctor for monitoring of Diabetic Diving.
One of the newer Dive computers, I can put you in touch with the program from the vendor. A NDA is available for those willing to work on software using that hardware.
And I e-mail them to my Doctor. Unless I want to copy them over from your meter or logbook BY HAND, then communication is a must. Otherwise, the potential for error rises.
>Am I wrong to expect a product in return that keeps working for more than just 2 or 3 years?
And you wonder why my only digital camera is one I consider a toy? And it is a replacement for the original under warrenty that got made into toast?
When I want dependability, I go with my Alpas. Warrentied for *MY* lifetime and still going strong. (My oldest one was built in 1964, my newest in 1988) or my Nikonos for underwater work - 1991.
And that is your tastes. Personally, I detest C C++ and C#, but that is my tastes. In the meantime, we are hiring COBOL programemrs here, and not hirign C, C++, and C# sharp programmers, or Java programmers or any of those other languages.
AND they should be teaching a few languages. In my school (years ago), some languages were 1 credit options. Everything else was taught in a language that pretty much no longer EXISTS.
Where I am, I see the need for COBOL still expanding all the time. We have hired in half a dozen COBOL programmers this year alone.
And int he general sense, it occurs elsewhere. We have DB2 as the database system for the largest systems here. We have reqs out for some new DBAs right now.
Basic COBOL is not that hard to pick up, but to really use it is. And add in CICS and DB2 access, and it isn't something you can pick up in a week.
The fact that the schools aren't even teaching those LANGUAGES anymore? There is a dwindling supply of experienced personal, while the need for them is still expanding. I love capitalism.....
I went 20 years before I got a PDA to track my appointments. I finally got a PDA for a "killer" ap. The blood meter module that could be attached. The schedule tracking is a nice to have, because it syncs with my laptop (which sits beside me on the desk here, and has a full size keyboard).
Pencil and paper. Because you can never depend on the hot babe to have a PDA that you can beam your name and address to.
Maybe you didn't understand the response. My personal laptop goes in and out with me every day. Along with my briefcase, which has a partial box of CD-RWs in it.
A 2GB SD card won't fit in the work machine that is here, but the CD-RWs will fit in my R/W drive on that machine.
Heck, up until recently, I was allowed to connect my laptop to the company LAN.
Slashdot Mirror
The Computers Merit Badge Phanplet, available at any Scout shop nation wide. You can drop some of it, but it has a lot of good stuff in it for your task.
And if you are going to do a history, don't start with the internet, get some paper tape, some punched cards, and some old floppy disks (8", 5.25" and 3.5") to show how far we have come over the years.
That's a bit more extreme than what I did, but good. I wrote a package and they owned it. (Even done of my own time, but I put the 7 interesting subprograms in the public domain, so I had what needed for other projects.) After I transfered to another group in the company, I got called a couple times for help adding new features to it. After I was laid off, I told them the next time they called - $75 an hour, 2 hour minimum. I was working as a consultant for a competitor... Never heard from them again.
10 years ago, Kodak published an article abuot film only being 10-15% of what it can be THEN.
Lens resolution peaked in the 1970's. All improvements since then have been in usability. In fact, in consumer cameras, resolution has gone BACKWARDS since the 1970's due to cost considerations, and that the lenses were better than the film at the time.
Oh, and with the scanner I have, I get over 20 MP. And at that the film has more resolution I can't get out of it.
Oh, and for hand held stuff, lighter is WORSE, not better.
35mm dead? Not by a long shot. The difference is that I don't need to buy anything but film anymore. I have my lenses from 24mm thru 2023mm and I have my multiple camera bodies (warrentied for MY LIFETIME). I need a new battery every ten YEARS or so.
For my underwater, besides film, I do need batteries a trifle more often (every year or so) and for the strobe, all of the use regular AAs or that I can get NIMHs for.
Finally, on all but one camera, the batteries control only flash and meter. If the batteries die, I can still shoot outdoors with a trained eye.
I was just accessing a 10 year old Kodak Photo disc this last week. Read it in my current machine with no trouble at all. (The disc was dated by Kodak as 10/96 for the second roll of film on it.) I have a couple more that are as much as 12 years old and have had no trouble yet.
I am a DBA and a DA. I have lost track of the number of languages, dialects of languages, and DBMSes I have learned and used over the years. But, I set my sights on the DBA position years ago, and here I am.
I can outperform the youngsters on almost any day of the week, both in quality and quantity. Many times I write code that in turn writes code. I write code that performs edits over and over, thus freeing me from the scut work. Who do you think all these younger coders come to when they can't get their programs to work?
And anyone that tells you COBOL is dead, better think again. COBOL will bury us, not the other way around. Even as a DBA, I had occasion to write a COBOL program just last month. It will become a shop standard next week, and ALL the developers will be using it.
As for the years gone by. I got a BSCS in 1981. I have been in the field ever since. Right now, I am working for a Fortune 500 company. ($1 Billion a year in revenue.) I have worked for both large and small companies, and to tell you the truth, I like the larger ones for some things, and the smaller for others. This place is a little of each, and I have been here 5.5 years. At various times, I used punched cards, and paper tape. I remember working on a machine with 4K of usable memory. My current laptop is orders of magnitude more powerful than the first mainframe I worked on.
Oh, and my father retired from this business 10 years ago, after 30+ years in IT.
When the company needs something done now, and needs it done right, who do you think they turn to?
I once had a company come to me at 9am, and request a validation program for an IRS tape to run in Production that very night. When it did, they avoided $4 Million in fines from the IRS.
Second this choice, but I would dump the CS Lewis stuff as well.
HA, NCR hardware makes Windows look like a perfect choice. I had an NCR machine once. I had to reload the OS 27 times over the first year, as the mother board was swapped out 7 times, the power supply 3 times, the hard drive twice, the floppy cable once (damaged by the tech fixing the Hard drive). The BIOS was "upgraded" 7 times. The backup device never did work. (Oh, and it wasn't a Windows or a DOS box either!) I was the guiena pig they used to try out the fixes to the problems. In another building a couple of miles away, they ended up swapping out parts of over 100 boxes for the same problems.
Given the choice, I'll take a Windows box with hardware by someone other than NCR over an NCR box EVERY time.
Too bad you don't pay attention. While I bought this latest machine with XP Pro installed (and it certainly wasn't as much as $100), I'll let that go and tell you that thru my employer I got Office 2003 Professional for 45$. Thats including Access and Powerpoint. And these are full registered versions. Anyone that pays full retail is a fool, and is soon parted from their money.
>Get a development database, a testing database and production database. Yes, you need all three.
Depending on the shop size, you might need more than that. Our current plan calls for 5, and that might not be enough.
>Have a naming standard for database tables. This will make your life SOOOO much easier.
And rule one of this standard is that no table, nor any column in any table may use a reserved word as a name. Trust me on this one, it will make your life SOOOO much easier.
Sorry, that is an invalid statement, as you do not have the authority to change to that ID. And since the ID you mentioned DOESN'T EXIST, I guess it didn't work as well.
And you don't have the password to log on with the ID that DOES exist.
I have worked in quite a few companies and not once has anyone short of management levels had a locking office. Suck it up and get a life.
Myself? I am not a network admin, I am the DA and a DBA for a fortune 500. I can not only reach all the data in the company, I can change it. Your silly little network passwords are no good unless *I* grant you database access.
http://www.ossc.state.or.us/oda/unaccredited.html
This is a website maintained by the University of Oregon that details all the SCAM online Universities for you. So, this is important to check out first, before you spend any money online.
Also, having checked them out, I consider University of Phoenix a lousy University, as their teaching methods are suspect for technical degrees. I found that out when I interviewed as a teacher with them.
Gee, and I thought my raise was BAD this year, but accepted it because I was also picking up an extra week's vacation on that very day as part of the bennie for finishing 5 years with the company. All that and a competitive raise too! Woohoo!
Oh, and I wrote my first COBOL program in 5 years this week too. (being a DBA means not having to write code all the time....) This program was worth it though. It will allow a change in the rules and no more middle of the night calls to just run an SPUFI for a programmer against production.
A good text book on Automata theory and finate state machines is the one by Zamir Bavel. University of Kansas was where he was teaching when he wrote it.
Multiple communications methods. For the blood meters, 1 is RS-232 and the other is USB. I then have software (since this is one company) that meshes it together for me to extract, and then put into a form to e-mail to the doc. Thru the RS-232 port, I did write an add-on that syncs the meter to atomic time via the PC clock.
As for the blood pressure meter, I just got that, and it uses a USB link. The internal is a XML database, and I haven't done mush with it yet (jsut got it about a week ago).
As for what goes on inside, I have some specs for the RS-232 versions. I also have the password for the Access database (I cracked it and gave it back to the vendor, who didn't have it as they farmed out development). As for the USB connection, that is the Handspring. I tried to get specs on that. Good luck.
As for the Dive computer. Mine uses RS-232. The protocal has been documented by several people(thru trial and error), and there is a Linux version in the works, but it isn't very pretty yet. Meanwhile, I have the file format from the downloaded file dechiphered. I then wrote a program to format that and send it to a special doctor for monitoring of Diabetic Diving.
One of the newer Dive computers, I can put you in touch with the program from the vendor. A NDA is available for those willing to work on software using that hardware.
And I e-mail them to my Doctor. Unless I want to copy them over from your meter or logbook BY HAND, then communication is a must. Otherwise, the potential for error rises.
There is 1 piece of Dive computer software for the MAC, none complete for Linux. All the others are Windows.
All Blood Sugar meters communicate with Windows, no MAC, No linux.
All Blood Pressure meters communicate with Windows, no MAC, No Linux.
(I'm talking consumer level medical devices, not hospitals here now. For hospitals, I don't know).
Since I have 3 pieces of software that require 1 OS, and all my other software will run on that same OS, hmm, it isn't rocket science here.
>Am I wrong to expect a product in return that keeps working for more than just 2 or 3 years?
And you wonder why my only digital camera is one I consider a toy? And it is a replacement for the original under warrenty that got made into toast?
When I want dependability, I go with my Alpas. Warrentied for *MY* lifetime and still going strong. (My oldest one was built in 1964, my newest in 1988) or my Nikonos for underwater work - 1991.
Of the people who are supporting this so we can bury them in correspondence?
And that is your tastes. Personally, I detest C C++ and C#, but that is my tastes. In the meantime, we are hiring COBOL programemrs here, and not hirign C, C++, and C# sharp programmers, or Java programmers or any of those other languages.
AND they should be teaching a few languages. In my school (years ago), some languages were 1 credit options. Everything else was taught in a language that pretty much no longer EXISTS.
Where I am, I see the need for COBOL still expanding all the time. We have hired in half a dozen COBOL programmers this year alone.
And int he general sense, it occurs elsewhere. We have DB2 as the database system for the largest systems here. We have reqs out for some new DBAs right now.
Basic COBOL is not that hard to pick up, but to really use it is. And add in CICS and DB2 access, and it isn't something you can pick up in a week.
The fact that the schools aren't even teaching those LANGUAGES anymore? There is a dwindling supply of experienced personal, while the need for them is still expanding. I love capitalism.....
Except that the HP failure rate is too low (i.e I was seeing 50% failure out of the box.)
Toshiba is too high. I've been lucky and seen 0% there.
I wonder why NCR didn't make the list? We were seeing over 80% failure there.
I went 20 years before I got a PDA to track my appointments. I finally got a PDA for a "killer" ap. The blood meter module that could be attached. The schedule tracking is a nice to have, because it syncs with my laptop (which sits beside me on the desk here, and has a full size keyboard).
Pencil and paper. Because you can never depend on the hot babe to have a PDA that you can beam your name and address to.
Maybe you didn't understand the response. My personal laptop goes in and out with me every day. Along with my briefcase, which has a partial box of CD-RWs in it.
A 2GB SD card won't fit in the work machine that is here, but the CD-RWs will fit in my R/W drive on that machine.
Heck, up until recently, I was allowed to connect my laptop to the company LAN.