Pretty much the same thing happened to me back in the late 1990's. However, I had a very good background in hardware (my first programming language was a soldering iron) and I am a graduate engineer. If you learn fast and don't believe too much of what sales weasels tell you then you might be all right.
Being very comfortable with both hardware and software is a real advantage since it gives you a perspective from both sides of the great divide. Don't focus too much on any one vendors "solution d'jour" but try to understand the real principles behind what you are doing. The best example of that I can think of off hand is if you know what a Netmask REALLY does in the hardware and think of it in BINARY then you never have to memorize silly rules about how to figure out what one needs to be. Hint -- study the XOR function and realize that an XOR gate was and is a piece of hardware.
It took me several months of intensive study (mostly nights and weekends) to get up to speed and I never really stopped learning. The only formal training I ever got was a three day class on the Firewall we were going to use and that was well worth it, since it got me started thinking about how EVERYTHING had an effect on Network Security -- It also got me another hat a few years latter as the Network Security Officer.
Now, for the downside. Networks are utilities and the only time your work is REALLY noticed is when the network is down. As a network administrator no one notices if you do your job right -- outages just never happen. When things do happen, however, they are ALWAYS your fault and you ALWAYS take far too long to fix them -- even if it is 3am in a blizzard when you had to come in and do it!
Good Luck
Back in the early 1960's I learned what was called the Minimax Regret algorithm in a class on linear programming. Unfortunately at that time I WAS the computer that had to execute the algorithm. Google did not invent Regret.
At the time my health care provider began implementing Electronic Medical Records I was working as the network engineer and Information Security Officer for a fairly large organization that was also subject to HIPAA I also was on the HIPAA technical implementation team for the organization. I was very concerned as to whether it would be done right and securely. Although I had no access to what back end controls the provider implemented, the front end I used to interact with it greatly exceeded my expectations. The advantages of such a system in terms of patient care and coordination among different doctors is something that anyone who has not been a part of such a system can not really appreciate. Whether I went to my regular primary care doctor, an alternate doctor since I needed to see a doctor NOW since I was sick, or when I had to go to either a routine specialist appointment or for a diagnostic procedure the doctors and medical personnel had ALL my medical records available. Think of how many times you have to list what medications you are taking whenever you see a different doctor. Think of how useful it might be to a doctor to see your detailed medical history to know whether something he or she was considering might be contraindicated by something in that history. Also when I had lab work done, I would get an email telling me to check the secure web site for results often on the same day as the tests! Also I could send private emails on that site to my doctor and medical team and they could reply for routine questions. It was wonderful. Now, this was probably a special case since it was a closed HMO to be specific, it was Kaiser Permanente in Georgia -- and it worked and worked well. Unfortunately my employer dropped them as an option last year and I am now back with whatever doctors are on the current plan and none are anywhere near this point technically. Electronic Medical Records are not a panacea and they have to be done right or really could put you at risk. I still question whether this can be done the way medicine is practiced in this country. It has become a three way adversarial contest with the interests of the patients, the doctors and the insurance companies all going in different directions. In a three person zero sum game there are no winners.
Back in the late 1960's as an undergraduate Rambling Wreck I took a class that gave me hands on access to a PDP8i. It was my first exposure to assembly programming (I still have the books) and after that I was hooked. I am retired now, after a pretty good 40 year run. But I am still learning new languages and platforms, just because I am STILL hooked. Thanks Mr. Olsen for an interesting life. It has been fun.
Anybody else old enough to remember the "electronic fence" between North Vietnam and the south? The popular name at the time was "The McNamara Line". However, those of us who were there called it a lot of other things. Worked about as well as other more ancient "walls" like the Great Wall, the Maginot Line and dozens of others throughout history.
Walls, whether made of steel and concrete or bits and bytes have never really worked. Like the man said you can not solve all social problems with technology.
Of course you might have trouble finding anyone who knows how to use one any more!
Really, a very cheep basic calculator with just add, subtract, multiply, divide and maybe square root should be enough for an intro physics class. You can sometimes find them for $1 at dollar stores! If there are trig functions involved you could supply a version of a trig table with selected functions and values. I know I sure didn't have any more than that available 40+ years ago and my trusty log log duplex decitrig.
Of course if you could borrow a nice wide band spectrum analyzer you could get a base line for signal strength and then watch for a big spike during the test! A directional antenna could let you home in on the culprit too!
Until the last couple of decades the Social Security Number in the US was only an identifier with NO financial value at all. It was an accounting identifier for the Social Security System initially, but had become a general "unique" identifier for many systems by the 1980's
It has not been that long ago that police departments all over the country would loan one an engraver with which you could permanently mark your valuable possessions so that, in the event of theft, they could be more easily returned to you.
Until the early 1990's at least, it was very common at many places for out of date computer generated reports on the nice wide green bar paper, common at the time, to be taken home by employees as scrap paper on which their children could draw on the back with crayons. Many of these reports had names, addresses, and Social Security Numbers on the front! Some even had salary and other now taboo information.
I personally used large stacks of old green bar paper the same way to draw flow charts and system diagrams. It is really so much easier to follow a flow chart that can be 30 feet long if need be without page connectors!
What happened though was that COMPANIES, yes private companies, started using the Social Security Number as a SUFFICIENT identifier in the granting of credit. This is what gave a stolen Social Security Number value, and made "Identity Theft" possible. Crooks are smart, they do not steal things with no value.
If ANYONE that granted credit without properly verifying the identity of who was getting that credit were held liable for any and all damages resulting from such fraud then the "crime" and problem of "Identity Theft" would disappear over night.
I don't hate computers, I am certainly not afraid of them, but I have been burned too many times to ever trust them completely (are you listing Toyota!).
I started with vacuum tubes and soldering irons and ended my career with routers, firewalls and server farms. I also wrote a lot of code on the way and did my share of Q.A. on others code too.
No, I don't hate them and I still like discovering new things that they will (and sometimes won't) do and new ways to do it
Computers -- even simple ones -- are complex systems, and since my original pedigree was in Systems Engineering the one thing that I learned early on was that whenever you THOUGHT you really understood all there was to know about ANY complex system was when it would take the opportunity to teach you something you never expected.
ID theft is not the crime. It is just another form of fraud where the organizations that grant credit are not the ones who suffer when the fraud is committed against them.
ID theft did not really exist until one could get credit based on simply a Social Security Number and little else. It was not that long ago where I worked that old stacks of large green bar print out paper covered on one side with peoples names, Social Security Numbers, and addresses were just taken home by virtually everyone for use by their children as scrap paper on which to draw with crayons. I would bet that anyone who was in IT back in the 1980's will remember this as normal.
Back then a "stolen" identity had no value. Things that have no value are not usually stolen. It was only when the credit card companies MADE an identity have value that "Identity Theft" became something that was worth stealing.
If some enterprising attorney would find a way to put together a nice class action law suit against the companies that control the issuance of credit and set a precedent that THEY were liable if credit was granted fraudulently in someones name who did not request it then ID theft would cease to exist since it would no longer be an externality
Having learned Assembly on a Dec PDP8 back in the mid 1960's I was struck by how similar the Altair 8800 looked to that machine. The Dec had fancier switches and we had a paper tape reader and a model 33 TTY for output. However, you STILL had to key in the FIRST (of two I think) boot loaders by hand in Octal on the front panel. Octal has NOT gone away, however. ALL IPV4 addresses are really OCTAL numbers. If you can think in Octal and know how an XOR gate works then Net Masks make perfect sense.
A very simple circuit of properly biased IF-MAYBE gates in a feedback loop with OCCASIONALLY-PERHAPS registers will produce an infinite string of perfectly random bits which can then be sampled to give perfect random numbers. I would swear that every computer I have worked on (going back to a PDP-8i) has had one or more of these somewhere -- undocumented of course...
I have NEVER been able to do arithmetic well, but did ok at most types of math as long as there were no numbers! Of course I never went much beyond ordinary differential equations.
Damn, I must be old! I remember when ALL of that stuff (including the typewriter) was brand new! I KNOW I have a box of two of DOS and Win 3.1 software on 5 inch disks down there some where, and lurking in the corner is a single board computer with an RCA CDP1802 processor. Oh, did I forget to mention the boxes of Byte magazines. Not quite back to Vol 1 No.1, but close and for many years thereafter. Too bad this place is all the way across the country, maybe I could find more stuff or maybe they would want some of what I have got!
TSA is missing the obvious solution. Make everyone fly in the nude with no carry on baggage. This was even talked about back in the 1970's when airplanes were just being detoured to Cuba. This new requirement is not only useless it is inane.
Any chance we could organize a nation wide don't fly this week protest of TSA? Let all the flights go empty for a week, and maybe we could force some sense into TSA and Fatherland -- excuse me -- Homeland Security too!
I have seen Password Safe recommended in a number of comments and I use it for any "sensitive" passwords. You still need to remember one master password for it, but that's easier than keeping track of dozens of them.
I have also found that in using Password Safe I am MUCH more likely to use a stronger password for two reasons. One is I don't have to memorize it and even more important is I don't have to type it. I just copy and paste from Password Safe.
Of course, like my Grandfather said about locks, passwords only keep the honest folks out.
Unless things have changed completely since I tried to learn Touch Typing (mid 1960's) it is not taught in a way that is really useful today. Touch Typing was (and I presume is) taught as a skill to permit one to TRANSCRIBE a document from a hand written original to a typed copy. It is pretty much a developed skill of eye finger coordination and GOOD touch typist does not even need to be able to read or understand what they are transcribing. That is pretty much a dead end skill. On the other hand, being able to COMPOSE on a keyboard without having to "hunt and peck" is a skill that is very useful today. I never was able to learn to TRANSCRIBE, but I have used every type of keyboard including 026 and 029 keypunch machines, Model 33 Teletypes, about a half dozen different dumb terminals and of course the current generation of 101 and 103 key PC keyboards. At one point in the late 1970's I was using at least five different keyboards on a daily basis! I have had bosses that thought I was touch typing for years, before I told them otherwise! Now, learning the key layout and being able to COMPOSE on a keyboard is one thing, but TOUCH TYPING TRANSCRIPTION is something else entirely.
I have bought two digital cameras in the last couple of years and both have been Canon. Two reasons. First both cameras take AA batteries -- either Alkaline or Nickle metal hydride. Second is that the firmware in the camera is upgradeable and there are upgrades from sources other than Canon. Now I have not upgraded the firmware, and have no plans right now to do so -- but at least Canon did not weld the hood shut! The ability to use standard batteries was the BIGGEST single factor in selecting these two cameras. If Panasonic wants to go lock down proprietary then they are off my list of possibles from the beginning.
When I was a child my daddy told me to be a plumber or a Volkswagen mechanic. I did not listen and got a degree in engineering and had a long and enjoyable career in IT. However, I ALWAYS was "hands on" and enjoyed it. I have more respect for the people who really know their trade than for many with advanced degrees who only know the theory. I learned as much from LISTING to and watching the people actually doing the work as I ever did sitting in a class room.
If this country is going to recover from the economic disaster we have created we have GOT to start MAKING things again. As most of the readers of Slashdot know being totally dependent on "Intellectual Property" for your existence is total Bull. IP can be part of SOMETHING but it can not stand alone. USE YOUR HANDS not just your mind.
This is a golden opportunity. Just develop an automobile with a Stirling Engine heated with PU-238 and let all the oil companies in on the action. In no time PU-238 will be EVERYWHERE!
Results - Reduced CO2 output, cars that go 1,000,000 miles on a fill up, and the a better than even chance at population reduction!
The very first job I had after getting my BS degree in engineering was overseas. I got the assignment after only a couple of months with the organization. It was a significant assignment and not only was I responsible for lots of very expensive equipment, but there were lives at stake.
I was only about 24 years old at the time too! Oh, the place was really exotic. It was deep in the tropics.
You see this organization that employed me was the US Air Force and it was during a little thing called the Vietnam War. I spent over four years getting my Bachelor's Degree in engineering, but my real education was completed over there -- others come first, life is not always fair, but it is better than the alternative, and what you do or don't do right CAN really make a difference for good or bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much the same thing happened to me back in the late 1990's. However, I had a very good background in hardware (my first programming language was a soldering iron) and I am a graduate engineer. If you learn fast and don't believe too much of what sales weasels tell you then you might be all right. Being very comfortable with both hardware and software is a real advantage since it gives you a perspective from both sides of the great divide. Don't focus too much on any one vendors "solution d'jour" but try to understand the real principles behind what you are doing. The best example of that I can think of off hand is if you know what a Netmask REALLY does in the hardware and think of it in BINARY then you never have to memorize silly rules about how to figure out what one needs to be. Hint -- study the XOR function and realize that an XOR gate was and is a piece of hardware. It took me several months of intensive study (mostly nights and weekends) to get up to speed and I never really stopped learning. The only formal training I ever got was a three day class on the Firewall we were going to use and that was well worth it, since it got me started thinking about how EVERYTHING had an effect on Network Security -- It also got me another hat a few years latter as the Network Security Officer. Now, for the downside. Networks are utilities and the only time your work is REALLY noticed is when the network is down. As a network administrator no one notices if you do your job right -- outages just never happen. When things do happen, however, they are ALWAYS your fault and you ALWAYS take far too long to fix them -- even if it is 3am in a blizzard when you had to come in and do it! Good Luck
Back in the early 1960's I learned what was called the Minimax Regret algorithm in a class on linear programming. Unfortunately at that time I WAS the computer that had to execute the algorithm. Google did not invent Regret.
At the time my health care provider began implementing Electronic Medical Records I was working as the network engineer and Information Security Officer for a fairly large organization that was also subject to HIPAA I also was on the HIPAA technical implementation team for the organization. I was very concerned as to whether it would be done right and securely. Although I had no access to what back end controls the provider implemented, the front end I used to interact with it greatly exceeded my expectations. The advantages of such a system in terms of patient care and coordination among different doctors is something that anyone who has not been a part of such a system can not really appreciate. Whether I went to my regular primary care doctor, an alternate doctor since I needed to see a doctor NOW since I was sick, or when I had to go to either a routine specialist appointment or for a diagnostic procedure the doctors and medical personnel had ALL my medical records available. Think of how many times you have to list what medications you are taking whenever you see a different doctor. Think of how useful it might be to a doctor to see your detailed medical history to know whether something he or she was considering might be contraindicated by something in that history. Also when I had lab work done, I would get an email telling me to check the secure web site for results often on the same day as the tests! Also I could send private emails on that site to my doctor and medical team and they could reply for routine questions. It was wonderful. Now, this was probably a special case since it was a closed HMO to be specific, it was Kaiser Permanente in Georgia -- and it worked and worked well. Unfortunately my employer dropped them as an option last year and I am now back with whatever doctors are on the current plan and none are anywhere near this point technically. Electronic Medical Records are not a panacea and they have to be done right or really could put you at risk. I still question whether this can be done the way medicine is practiced in this country. It has become a three way adversarial contest with the interests of the patients, the doctors and the insurance companies all going in different directions. In a three person zero sum game there are no winners.
Back in the late 1960's as an undergraduate Rambling Wreck I took a class that gave me hands on access to a PDP8i. It was my first exposure to assembly programming (I still have the books) and after that I was hooked. I am retired now, after a pretty good 40 year run. But I am still learning new languages and platforms, just because I am STILL hooked. Thanks Mr. Olsen for an interesting life. It has been fun.
Anybody else old enough to remember the "electronic fence" between North Vietnam and the south? The popular name at the time was "The McNamara Line". However, those of us who were there called it a lot of other things. Worked about as well as other more ancient "walls" like the Great Wall, the Maginot Line and dozens of others throughout history. Walls, whether made of steel and concrete or bits and bytes have never really worked. Like the man said you can not solve all social problems with technology.
I could not have said it better myself. Now, it is time for someone in the mainstream media to say this out loud so everyone can hear it!
Really, a very cheep basic calculator with just add, subtract, multiply, divide and maybe square root should be enough for an intro physics class. You can sometimes find them for $1 at dollar stores! If there are trig functions involved you could supply a version of a trig table with selected functions and values. I know I sure didn't have any more than that available 40+ years ago and my trusty log log duplex decitrig.
Of course if you could borrow a nice wide band spectrum analyzer you could get a base line for signal strength and then watch for a big spike during the test! A directional antenna could let you home in on the culprit too!
It has not been that long ago that police departments all over the country would loan one an engraver with which you could permanently mark your valuable possessions so that, in the event of theft, they could be more easily returned to you.
Until the early 1990's at least, it was very common at many places for out of date computer generated reports on the nice wide green bar paper, common at the time, to be taken home by employees as scrap paper on which their children could draw on the back with crayons. Many of these reports had names, addresses, and Social Security Numbers on the front! Some even had salary and other now taboo information.
I personally used large stacks of old green bar paper the same way to draw flow charts and system diagrams. It is really so much easier to follow a flow chart that can be 30 feet long if need be without page connectors!
What happened though was that COMPANIES, yes private companies, started using the Social Security Number as a SUFFICIENT identifier in the granting of credit. This is what gave a stolen Social Security Number value, and made "Identity Theft" possible. Crooks are smart, they do not steal things with no value.
If ANYONE that granted credit without properly verifying the identity of who was getting that credit were held liable for any and all damages resulting from such fraud then the "crime" and problem of "Identity Theft" would disappear over night.
I don't hate computers, I am certainly not afraid of them, but I have been burned too many times to ever trust them completely (are you listing Toyota!).
I started with vacuum tubes and soldering irons and ended my career with routers, firewalls and server farms. I also wrote a lot of code on the way and did my share of Q.A. on others code too.
No, I don't hate them and I still like discovering new things that they will (and sometimes won't) do and new ways to do it
Computers -- even simple ones -- are complex systems, and since my original pedigree was in Systems Engineering the one thing that I learned early on was that whenever you THOUGHT you really understood all there was to know about ANY complex system was when it would take the opportunity to teach you something you never expected.
Another important lesson is "Do NOT try to catch a falling soldering iron."
Been there. Done that. Once was enough.
ID theft is not the crime. It is just another form of fraud where the organizations that grant credit are not the ones who suffer when the fraud is committed against them. ID theft did not really exist until one could get credit based on simply a Social Security Number and little else. It was not that long ago where I worked that old stacks of large green bar print out paper covered on one side with peoples names, Social Security Numbers, and addresses were just taken home by virtually everyone for use by their children as scrap paper on which to draw with crayons. I would bet that anyone who was in IT back in the 1980's will remember this as normal. Back then a "stolen" identity had no value. Things that have no value are not usually stolen. It was only when the credit card companies MADE an identity have value that "Identity Theft" became something that was worth stealing. If some enterprising attorney would find a way to put together a nice class action law suit against the companies that control the issuance of credit and set a precedent that THEY were liable if credit was granted fraudulently in someones name who did not request it then ID theft would cease to exist since it would no longer be an externality
Having learned Assembly on a Dec PDP8 back in the mid 1960's I was struck by how similar the Altair 8800 looked to that machine. The Dec had fancier switches and we had a paper tape reader and a model 33 TTY for output. However, you STILL had to key in the FIRST (of two I think) boot loaders by hand in Octal on the front panel. Octal has NOT gone away, however. ALL IPV4 addresses are really OCTAL numbers. If you can think in Octal and know how an XOR gate works then Net Masks make perfect sense.
A very simple circuit of properly biased IF-MAYBE gates in a feedback loop with OCCASIONALLY-PERHAPS registers will produce an infinite string of perfectly random bits which can then be sampled to give perfect random numbers. I would swear that every computer I have worked on (going back to a PDP-8i) has had one or more of these somewhere -- undocumented of course...
I have NEVER been able to do arithmetic well, but did ok at most types of math as long as there were no numbers! Of course I never went much beyond ordinary differential equations.
Damn, I must be old! I remember when ALL of that stuff (including the typewriter) was brand new! I KNOW I have a box of two of DOS and Win 3.1 software on 5 inch disks down there some where, and lurking in the corner is a single board computer with an RCA CDP1802 processor. Oh, did I forget to mention the boxes of Byte magazines. Not quite back to Vol 1 No.1, but close and for many years thereafter. Too bad this place is all the way across the country, maybe I could find more stuff or maybe they would want some of what I have got!
TSA is missing the obvious solution. Make everyone fly in the nude with no carry on baggage. This was even talked about back in the 1970's when airplanes were just being detoured to Cuba. This new requirement is not only useless it is inane. Any chance we could organize a nation wide don't fly this week protest of TSA? Let all the flights go empty for a week, and maybe we could force some sense into TSA and Fatherland -- excuse me -- Homeland Security too!
I have seen Password Safe recommended in a number of comments and I use it for any "sensitive" passwords. You still need to remember one master password for it, but that's easier than keeping track of dozens of them. I have also found that in using Password Safe I am MUCH more likely to use a stronger password for two reasons. One is I don't have to memorize it and even more important is I don't have to type it. I just copy and paste from Password Safe. Of course, like my Grandfather said about locks, passwords only keep the honest folks out.
I thought the MAIN business of Banks was to defraud their customers. So why isn't this 100%?
Cool hack of what I think is a pretty useless DHS gadget. What is to prevent someone from holding up a mirror and bedazzling the bedazzler?
Unless things have changed completely since I tried to learn Touch Typing (mid 1960's) it is not taught in a way that is really useful today. Touch Typing was (and I presume is) taught as a skill to permit one to TRANSCRIBE a document from a hand written original to a typed copy. It is pretty much a developed skill of eye finger coordination and GOOD touch typist does not even need to be able to read or understand what they are transcribing. That is pretty much a dead end skill. On the other hand, being able to COMPOSE on a keyboard without having to "hunt and peck" is a skill that is very useful today. I never was able to learn to TRANSCRIBE, but I have used every type of keyboard including 026 and 029 keypunch machines, Model 33 Teletypes, about a half dozen different dumb terminals and of course the current generation of 101 and 103 key PC keyboards. At one point in the late 1970's I was using at least five different keyboards on a daily basis! I have had bosses that thought I was touch typing for years, before I told them otherwise! Now, learning the key layout and being able to COMPOSE on a keyboard is one thing, but TOUCH TYPING TRANSCRIPTION is something else entirely.
I have bought two digital cameras in the last couple of years and both have been Canon. Two reasons. First both cameras take AA batteries -- either Alkaline or Nickle metal hydride. Second is that the firmware in the camera is upgradeable and there are upgrades from sources other than Canon. Now I have not upgraded the firmware, and have no plans right now to do so -- but at least Canon did not weld the hood shut! The ability to use standard batteries was the BIGGEST single factor in selecting these two cameras. If Panasonic wants to go lock down proprietary then they are off my list of possibles from the beginning.
When I was a child my daddy told me to be a plumber or a Volkswagen mechanic. I did not listen and got a degree in engineering and had a long and enjoyable career in IT. However, I ALWAYS was "hands on" and enjoyed it. I have more respect for the people who really know their trade than for many with advanced degrees who only know the theory. I learned as much from LISTING to and watching the people actually doing the work as I ever did sitting in a class room. If this country is going to recover from the economic disaster we have created we have GOT to start MAKING things again. As most of the readers of Slashdot know being totally dependent on "Intellectual Property" for your existence is total Bull. IP can be part of SOMETHING but it can not stand alone. USE YOUR HANDS not just your mind.
It'll take only one car accident bad enough to breach containment, it'll cook a lot of folks.
Well, SOMETHING has got to cause the population reduction!
This is a golden opportunity. Just develop an automobile with a Stirling Engine heated with PU-238 and let all the oil companies in on the action. In no time PU-238 will be EVERYWHERE! Results - Reduced CO2 output, cars that go 1,000,000 miles on a fill up, and the a better than even chance at population reduction!
The very first job I had after getting my BS degree in engineering was overseas. I got the assignment after only a couple of months with the organization. It was a significant assignment and not only was I responsible for lots of very expensive equipment, but there were lives at stake. I was only about 24 years old at the time too! Oh, the place was really exotic. It was deep in the tropics. You see this organization that employed me was the US Air Force and it was during a little thing called the Vietnam War. I spent over four years getting my Bachelor's Degree in engineering, but my real education was completed over there -- others come first, life is not always fair, but it is better than the alternative, and what you do or don't do right CAN really make a difference for good or bad.