"If they can get to to ask the wrong questions they don't have to worry about the answers."
Why should a person be paid every time a created work is used? Shouldn't I be able to buy a right-to-use once and then re-use it forever without having to continue to pay the owner? But to do this would beggar lawyers and executors and other who live off the creations of others.
Ref: "If you don't have something that people can't get at home, it's not worth the trouble." and "As other posters suggested, if you combine food/coffee with the gaming, you may be onto something."
We have a wine / furniture / gifts / cards store in a small town. We needed a variety of items to pay the rent since none of the lines pays the overhead on its own. The idea of putting a number of related retail lines in a store is a good one - don't be afraid to add something new and don't be afraid of dropping low profit or low attraction lines. In our case, we added vintage soda pop and will be adding wheat-free snacks. We've dropped our pottery and cheap drinking glasses lines because they weren't profitable.
Our small town is trying to become a tourist destination. What they forget is that people won't come to town (or to your store) unless you have something that people can't get at home.
Second point: have enough funding to keep the store open at a loss for months. It takes time for word of mouth to get around. Consider leasing vs. buying, and remember that there are lots of taxes you'll find out about the hard way.
I listen on-line because there are are enjoyable choices not because there are many choices. I commute 2 hours a day by car and drive through 2 distinct FM markets. Scanning the FM band brings junk songs, brainless talk shows, and obnoxious in-your-face MP3 jockeys. The best station of the 2 lots KTCV located a high-school where the kids are learning to be radio announcers. No sanitized play-lists there but a lot of enthusiasm.
Last night one of my favorite on-line broadcasters got in to an hour-long collection of really enjoyable music. I stayed at the computer faaar too long listening.
I work for a comapny that does value employee longevity. You don't have to "move up in the world" to stay. What you do have to do is tie your career to the current business-system software that the company uses (be it PeopleSoft, er, OracleSoft). This means taht you live/eat/breathe the production systems using that software. It isn't the same as creating a new system - it does pay the bills.
Re:This is a new trend
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The company I work for may do a telephone interview before the main interviews. The candidate meets with the HR person for an hour to understand the benefits and environment of the company; then has 3-4 hour-long sessions with managers and peons in the company; then checks out with HR. Everyone scheduled to talk with the candidate has a copy of the resume before the meeting and is expected to write down comments on the technical skills of the person. The thoughts are 1) make sure the managers have at least met with the new hire and 2) record impressions and facts from a spectrum of people within the company both managers and co-workers. The results have been pretty good.
Back when all amateur radio operators had to learn Morse Code they also learned a series of code shortcuts that carried over to speech. For example, the Q-code phrase "QTH" meant "What is your location?" This meaning carried over into speech as is "QTH here is Erehwon, VT." However, the abbreviations were listed and controlled, not free form as on the Web.
I suppose that there is a l337 dictionary out there that we should be memorizing....
... turn on a computer. I'd rather work in the family's wine store - alcohol at wholesale and a chance to meet affluent people who don't jabber on about computers. "Pretentious with a slight oaky taste..."
There are about 49 different kinds of amateur radio out there with fanatics for each. The 1 thing that hams have in common is the desire to be able to talk to someone else, anywhere else, at any time, despite what nature, Murphy, and anyone else does. Sort of like being connected 24/7. Some hams are "appliance operators" who just use the radio - other like to delve in to the innards and debate the advantages of using a.12uH inductor to replace the stock.10uH to lessen the noise floor.
I was at a seminar a couple of years ago where the hams were bouncing signals off Mt. Rainier so they could get line-of-sight communication between Ellensburg and Seattle over the Cascade mountains. They were using elaborate techniques to pick out a signal 10 dB below the noise level. They used signal processing, a knowledge of RF propagation, and computer power to get their message through. Admittedly the baud rate was about.01 but they did connect. There is a terrific overlap between the hams and the software people...
The point of the article was that with a bad basic design you spend the rest of your life patching and compromising. C/C++ allows buffer overflows - so you can check or not as you wish and have security or not. A good programmer is not necessarily a secure programmer - it depends on what the boss wants.
Outsourcing can be internal (to the United States) and almost as bad as moving the work off-shore. For example, a major contractor at a GOCO is replaced with 13 contractors, each of whom got their piece of the bid by offering to lower the costs of operation. How do they lower it? 3 companies kept the pay and benefits of the old contractor. In the other 10 companies the employees lost their pensions to start, then the cost of healthcare insurance went up 10x from the former rate. Any new work gets assigned to the outsourced companies while the 3 unionized companies think of ways to move more work to the outsourcers.
Outsourcing definitely can be done on-shore.
How much fuel will there be in a reactor? A back-of-the envelope calculation using the reactor size in the picture gives a fuel load of about 30 Kg of enriched Uranium. Part of what doomed NERVA was possibility of burning up the reactor in the atmosphere. The chance of doing so is small but the wide-spread contamination would be a PR nightmare. (For reference, the atomsphereic nuclear weapons testing put about 1500 kg of Pu and enriched U in to the atomsphere over 18 years.)
Fuel enrichment?. Naval reactors are enriched to >90% U235 (from 0.7% natural). The NERVA rocket (and I suppose this rocket) was also enriched to above 90% U235. This would be a significant cost and would produce about 1000 kg of depeleted Uranium.
A realistic actual cost? A 1973 study on testing and building a reactor based on the NERVA/KIWI experience was about $4-5 billion including reuse of some NERVA facilities. Part of the explanation for the increased cost was the additional nuclear safety requirements imposed after NERVA/KIWI started work. This total is a lot higher than the "$1 billion" for a prototype system even not accounting for inflation.
IMHO, P&W have entended the engineering on the NERVA/KIWI but this article is salesman-speak that politely avoids the issues that doomed NERVA. A pleasant fantasy for the/. crowd.
20+ years ago a customer, a statistician by trade, took a course in Fortran to understand what we were coding for him. His first program compiled and executed correctly for him the first time. He didn't understand why we had so much trouble writing and debugging programs. They are out there...
Skip the tool-and-die making. The Wall Street Journal reported last month about how that extremely skillful job is moving offshore. Why pay $80K for a good design/mold here when you can get it for $40K overseas?
Based on some other people here, 1) business, 2) engineering (if doesn't matter which kind) 3) science. Any of them will give you insights in to the customer's problem and processes that you are trying to solve or automate.
For example, my current software development group has a manager with a chemistry degree; the programmers are a chem tech and a physicist; the QA person has a degree in criminal justice; and the project manager was an oceanographer. The group was support is a chemical analysis lab and the more we understand their business and problems the more questions we can ask early about what the system should do.
The previous contractor on site had 2 lists - engineers and others. The engineers got preferential pay, promotion, and retention bonuses even hough they did the same programming as others. The engineers came from a mining, electrical, and chemical backgrounds. Didn't matter - they had the engineering degree and se were part of the privilieged class.
Johnson Hall at the University of Washington (in Seattle) is also undergoing removation. Maybe the powerful positron-generating accelerator is hidden there?
There was also a demonstration project near Hanford. The problem here was that the amount of energy needed to vitrify a million-gallon waste tank in situ was fairly large - about the full electrical output of a nuclear plant for 2 years for 1 tank. At 149 tanks, that's a lot of energy.
The current waste vitrification plant will mix the contents of the tanks with non-radioactive material to make a long-lived glass at a considerable energy savings.
An advantage of a low-budget film with a near-amateur cast and crew is that the audience can watch and think, "Damn! I could make a film like that." Except that most of the people watching won't have the drive to make the film happen.
Sometimes low budget can be inspirational in a way that a big-bidget CGI flick can't. I enjoyed "Lord of the Rings" but I can't imagine making a movie like it. Hanging around Papa Tud's (local pizza take-out), checking camera angles, listening to the locals - that I can do.
Another point is that "Clerks" was made when the experience of clerking was still fresh in his mind. Now that Kevin Smith isn't clerking the movie will probably be more like nostalgia. Kind of like Dilbert going downhill now that Scott Adams relies on e-mail for his bizzarre situations.
I use stored procedures for security and linited access. However, that can be carried to extremes. I was called in to diagnose why a project in production suddenly quit working. A developer had come up with a scheme where every stored procedure would verify the security level of the caller every time the stored procedure was called. The scheme worked fine when installed in a few peripheral procedures but crashed the application when installed everywhere. The problem was that the checking was single-threaded and locked a table every time the security was checked. Parallel operations became serial. Users who were feeding in information from hand-held scanners timed out. The coded-in-to-the-procedure security was removed.
I guess the lesson learned was to review the design by DBAs before implementing, and test under load before going in to production.
A point I haven't seen mentioned is configuration management. In a disciplined team any member knows where to go to get/inspect the code that the app is executing.
Years ago I insisted that the developers work in SQL stored procedures so I could see exactly what they were running / testing in our app. It was amazing how often the code that the developer thought we were testing wasn't what was in the database. Using sp_helptext on the procedure I was able to defuse many "testing errors" as "configuration management" errors.
In later groups I've been more adamant that developers and testers and the project lead follow a configuration management scheme. Whether the code is in the database or the app, interpreted or compiled, I want to know what we are running / testing / developing.
Why is it so difficult to keep it from leaking?
1) The older tanks are a concrete vault with a steel liner on the bottom and sides. The tanks are 500,000 gallons to 1,000,000 gallons in size.
2) The older tanks were construncted in 1943-1944. That's a lot of time to rust.
3) Some of the waste was so concentrated that it would self-boil (the heat of the decay products was high enough to heat the solution to the boiling point). This high heat helped destroy the integrity of the steel tanks.
4) The waste in the tanks is the result of a number of different chemical processes that used water, organic solvents, flocculating agents, etc. Most of the industrial chemicals known to man are in those tanks, somewhere.
In short, the tanks are a kind of devil's chemical brew PLUS it is a radioactive brew. The radioactive emissions (neutron, gamma) tend to weaken and disrupt materials.
When the tank started leaking it had to loose 2750 gallons to drop the surface level 1" (2.5 cm). Many times the tank contents were foaming so it was difficult to tell where the surface was.
Additional question: What information do they expect from their employees?
In other words, are they going to micro-manage every decision or do they do their manager things when asked? Are they a person who must know everything or someone who trusts employees to tell him (her) when things are not going normally? There is no generic right or wrong answer since the answer depends on the what the team working for the manager expects.
Additional information - what information the team expects the manager to provide to the team...
A few years ago my team met with the new manager and explained what information we needed him to provide. He then explained what he needed to know to manage us. We got along fine - he did the proper mangement interfacing that let the team do their technical best.
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"If they can get to to ask the wrong questions they don't have to worry about the answers." Why should a person be paid every time a created work is used? Shouldn't I be able to buy a right-to-use once and then re-use it forever without having to continue to pay the owner? But to do this would beggar lawyers and executors and other who live off the creations of others.
We have a wine / furniture / gifts / cards store in a small town. We needed a variety of items to pay the rent since none of the lines pays the overhead on its own. The idea of putting a number of related retail lines in a store is a good one - don't be afraid to add something new and don't be afraid of dropping low profit or low attraction lines. In our case, we added vintage soda pop and will be adding wheat-free snacks. We've dropped our pottery and cheap drinking glasses lines because they weren't profitable.
Our small town is trying to become a tourist destination. What they forget is that people won't come to town (or to your store) unless you have something that people can't get at home.
Second point: have enough funding to keep the store open at a loss for months. It takes time for word of mouth to get around. Consider leasing vs. buying, and remember that there are lots of taxes you'll find out about the hard way.
Good luck and go for it!!!!
Joe
Read "The Peace War" by Vernor Vinge for a future view of nearly-absolute power and how information mis-management can subvert it.
16 years and a few GameBoys later still the best game for killing some time.
Last night one of my favorite on-line broadcasters got in to an hour-long collection of really enjoyable music. I stayed at the computer faaar too long listening.
I work for a comapny that does value employee longevity. You don't have to "move up in the world" to stay. What you do have to do is tie your career to the current business-system software that the company uses (be it PeopleSoft, er, OracleSoft). This means taht you live/eat/breathe the production systems using that software. It isn't the same as creating a new system - it does pay the bills.
The company I work for may do a telephone interview before the main interviews. The candidate meets with the HR person for an hour to understand the benefits and environment of the company; then has 3-4 hour-long sessions with managers and peons in the company; then checks out with HR. Everyone scheduled to talk with the candidate has a copy of the resume before the meeting and is expected to write down comments on the technical skills of the person.
The thoughts are 1) make sure the managers have at least met with the new hire and 2) record impressions and facts from a spectrum of people within the company both managers and co-workers.
The results have been pretty good.
Back when all amateur radio operators had to learn Morse Code they also learned a series of code shortcuts that carried over to speech. For example, the Q-code phrase "QTH" meant "What is your location?" This meaning carried over into speech as is "QTH here is Erehwon, VT." However, the abbreviations were listed and controlled, not free form as on the Web.
I suppose that there is a l337 dictionary out there that we should be memorizing....
... turn on a computer. I'd rather work in the family's wine store - alcohol at wholesale and a chance to meet affluent people who don't jabber on about computers. "Pretentious with a slight oaky taste..."
There are about 49 different kinds of amateur radio out there with fanatics for each. The 1 thing that hams have in common is the desire to be able to talk to someone else, anywhere else, at any time, despite what nature, Murphy, and anyone else does. Sort of like being connected 24/7. Some hams are "appliance operators" who just use the radio - other like to delve in to the innards and debate the advantages of using a .12uH inductor to replace the stock .10uH to lessen the noise floor. .01 but they did connect.
I was at a seminar a couple of years ago where the hams were bouncing signals off Mt. Rainier so they could get line-of-sight communication between Ellensburg and Seattle over the Cascade mountains. They were using elaborate techniques to pick out a signal 10 dB below the noise level. They used signal processing, a knowledge of RF propagation, and computer power to get their message through. Admittedly the baud rate was about
There is a terrific overlap between the hams and the software people...
The point of the article was that with a bad basic design you spend the rest of your life patching and compromising. C/C++ allows buffer overflows - so you can check or not as you wish and have security or not.
A good programmer is not necessarily a secure programmer - it depends on what the boss wants.
Outsourcing can be internal (to the United States) and almost as bad as moving the work off-shore. For example, a major contractor at a GOCO is replaced with 13 contractors, each of whom got their piece of the bid by offering to lower the costs of operation. How do they lower it? 3 companies kept the pay and benefits of the old contractor. In the other 10 companies the employees lost their pensions to start, then the cost of healthcare insurance went up 10x from the former rate. Any new work gets assigned to the outsourced companies while the 3 unionized companies think of ways to move more work to the outsourcers.
Outsourcing definitely can be done on-shore.
Fuel enrichment?. Naval reactors are enriched to >90% U235 (from 0.7% natural). The NERVA rocket (and I suppose this rocket) was also enriched to above 90% U235. This would be a significant cost and would produce about 1000 kg of depeleted Uranium.
A realistic actual cost? A 1973 study on testing and building a reactor based on the NERVA/KIWI experience was about $4-5 billion including reuse of some NERVA facilities. Part of the explanation for the increased cost was the additional nuclear safety requirements imposed after NERVA/KIWI started work. This total is a lot higher than the "$1 billion" for a prototype system even not accounting for inflation.
IMHO, P&W have entended the engineering on the NERVA/KIWI but this article is salesman-speak that politely avoids the issues that doomed NERVA. A pleasant fantasy for the /. crowd.
Computer Engineering isn't recognized as an engineering discipline here.
20+ years ago a customer, a statistician by trade, took a course in Fortran to understand what we were coding for him. His first program compiled and executed correctly for him the first time. He didn't understand why we had so much trouble writing and debugging programs.
They are out there...
Skip the tool-and-die making. The Wall Street Journal reported last month about how that extremely skillful job is moving offshore. Why pay $80K for a good design/mold here when you can get it for $40K overseas?
Based on some other people here, 1) business, 2) engineering (if doesn't matter which kind) 3) science. Any of them will give you insights in to the customer's problem and processes that you are trying to solve or automate.
For example, my current software development group has a manager with a chemistry degree; the programmers are a chem tech and a physicist; the QA person has a degree in criminal justice; and the project manager was an oceanographer. The group was support is a chemical analysis lab and the more we understand their business and problems the more questions we can ask early about what the system should do.
The previous contractor on site had 2 lists - engineers and others. The engineers got preferential pay, promotion, and retention bonuses even hough they did the same programming as others. The engineers came from a mining, electrical, and chemical backgrounds. Didn't matter - they had the engineering degree and se were part of the privilieged class.
Johnson Hall at the University of Washington (in Seattle) is also undergoing removation. Maybe the powerful positron-generating accelerator is hidden there?
The current waste vitrification plant will mix the contents of the tanks with non-radioactive material to make a long-lived glass at a considerable energy savings.
And Scott Adams is a money grubber. Oh, for the purity of a Gary Watterson who refused to let Calvin and Hobbes be licensed for ANYTHING.
Sometimes low budget can be inspirational in a way that a big-bidget CGI flick can't. I enjoyed "Lord of the Rings" but I can't imagine making a movie like it. Hanging around Papa Tud's (local pizza take-out), checking camera angles, listening to the locals - that I can do.
Another point is that "Clerks" was made when the experience of clerking was still fresh in his mind. Now that Kevin Smith isn't clerking the movie will probably be more like nostalgia. Kind of like Dilbert going downhill now that Scott Adams relies on e-mail for his bizzarre situations.
I use stored procedures for security and linited access. However, that can be carried to extremes. I was called in to diagnose why a project in production suddenly quit working. A developer had come up with a scheme where every stored procedure would verify the security level of the caller every time the stored procedure was called. The scheme worked fine when installed in a few peripheral procedures but crashed the application when installed everywhere. The problem was that the checking was single-threaded and locked a table every time the security was checked. Parallel operations became serial. Users who were feeding in information from hand-held scanners timed out. The coded-in-to-the-procedure security was removed.
I guess the lesson learned was to review the design by DBAs before implementing, and test under load before going in to production.
A point I haven't seen mentioned is configuration management. In a disciplined team any member knows where to go to get/inspect the code that the app is executing.
Years ago I insisted that the developers work in SQL stored procedures so I could see exactly what they were running / testing in our app. It was amazing how often the code that the developer thought we were testing wasn't what was in the database. Using sp_helptext on the procedure I was able to defuse many "testing errors" as "configuration management" errors.
In later groups I've been more adamant that developers and testers and the project lead follow a configuration management scheme. Whether the code is in the database or the app, interpreted or compiled, I want to know what we are running / testing / developing.
Why is it so difficult to keep it from leaking?
1) The older tanks are a concrete vault with a steel liner on the bottom and sides. The tanks are 500,000 gallons to 1,000,000 gallons in size.
2) The older tanks were construncted in 1943-1944. That's a lot of time to rust.
3) Some of the waste was so concentrated that it would self-boil (the heat of the decay products was high enough to heat the solution to the boiling point). This high heat helped destroy the integrity of the steel tanks.
4) The waste in the tanks is the result of a number of different chemical processes that used water, organic solvents, flocculating agents, etc. Most of the industrial chemicals known to man are in those tanks, somewhere.
In short, the tanks are a kind of devil's chemical brew PLUS it is a radioactive brew. The radioactive emissions (neutron, gamma) tend to weaken and disrupt materials.
When the tank started leaking it had to loose 2750 gallons to drop the surface level 1" (2.5 cm). Many times the tank contents were foaming so it was difficult to tell where the surface was.
In other words, are they going to micro-manage every decision or do they do their manager things when asked? Are they a person who must know everything or someone who trusts employees to tell him (her) when things are not going normally?
There is no generic right or wrong answer since the answer depends on the what the team working for the manager expects.
Additional information - what information the team expects the manager to provide to the team...
A few years ago my team met with the new manager and explained what information we needed him to provide. He then explained what he needed to know to manage us. We got along fine - he did the proper mangement interfacing that let the team do their technical best.
I commute 45+ miles to work in a car. I ride the bike to relax. Amazing how the work-related stresses go away as the lactic acid builds up.