You don't want to impress them *too much*, though. And one thing that can really be problematic is if you've developed a commercial (or potentially commercial) product that competes in a market where your employer has an interest. Another big thing that's been a problem for me and some of my colleagues, if you're "aiming low" because jobs are such slim pickings right now, it shows. It's not necessarily a good thing that you "did X which generated a $40 million annual budget" or you "managed a distributed team of 50 developers." Even I would be tempted to skip past you, saying "we won't be able to keep this person here for a full budget cycle."
Don't "be someone" who can easily get $75/hr contract gigs but is applying for a $45K/year research job. If that's what you're trying to do, there's an art to tailoring your resume to make you not seem overqualified.
"Here's a big part of being a successful IT employee: be mobile. Fully, if possible."
Don't buy a house. Don't be active in a local community. Don't make friends. Don't develop local business relationships. Don't get married. Don't have kids. Don't even get pets.
I don't know how you measure "success."
On one hand, I *am* willing to do "100%" travel if the compensation is good. (But my travel rate is several times my normal rate.)
I had to be very harsh with a persistent recruiter who could not understand why I wasn't motivated to relocate to Salt Lake City Utah (from San Diego California). Sometimes "Being mobile" has a cost that I mark very high.
The dial turns away from urban idealism and back toward agrarian subsistence. If environmental or political factors are such that subsistence becomes impossible, then some segment of the population literally starves. My great-great grandparents saw this happen in Ireland, so it doesn't seem so far in the distant past to me.
In some sense, living in an urban area is itself a type of wealth. Look at it this way - these people may be poor, but if they didn't have the benefits of living within the context of an urban infrastructure, most of them would literally starve and freeze to death.
It is equally ridiculous to believe that 100% of the Republican Delegation will devote the entire career to doing nothing but obstructing the Senate, though. That is the implication behind any mention of the fact that the Democrats have fewer than 60 seats. The Republican Party Unity doesn't extend so far as to engender political suicide for any given member, and some of them are not facing healthy prospects in their 2010 election cycle.
Remember, only two, maybe three Republican Senators have to be willing to do something other than participate in a blatant political obstruction, and they are much less coherent than that.
The Senate leadership is equally satisfied with Franken and Burris taking office, those seats being vacant (but uncounted, it's a 98-seat Senate until there is a process by which those seats could be filled), or even with moderate Republicans who are facing election in 2010. The Democrats are not seeking a majority or even hoping for a supermajority anymore. All they need is for one or two Republicans to be less than willing to halt their careers in order to blatantly obstruct the Senate. It's ludicrous to believe they will *all* do that.
>Well, the Macintosh has been playing music since 1984.
My first published computer music was made with an Orchestra-80, in 1980. Before that, I was stuck with abusing the cassette relay and FM radio interference:-)
>Can you just explain to me what that line is, and how Israel expects Hamas to step back?
I don't know how many times Israel offered a truce if Hamas would kindly stop lobbing rockets and mortars into populated areas, but the number of rockets was in the 6000 range. While Hamas was negotiating a truce, they were also digging a tunnel with the purpose of kidnapping Israeli soldiers. Israel doesn't expect them to "step back." Israel expects them to die, and die some more, until maybe, if they happen to step back to the extent that Israel takes notice, maybe the punishment will stop. Maybe not.
>Do you really want to go down that road?
Not I. I do not seriously believe it is in my power to affect this situation.
In a 98 seat Senate (pefectly legitimate) only 59 votes are required for cloture. Also worth considering, there are more than a few Republicans whose re-election prospects in 2010 are slim enough that they really need to do more during this term than merely play a game of obstruction, doing nothing but voting down cloture motions. What that means is, it's really not as important as has been claimed that the Democrats did not get a supermajority. The first time they try to vote down Cloture, Reid will give the order that the filibuster has to actually take place, and Senators will have to decide whether they want to be shown on C-SPAN sleeping on cots, peeing in bottles, reading phone books, etc., or whether they should let bills get floor votes. I'm satisfied either way.
"As soon as they tried to order something, I noticed. I had the card disabled, the merchant stopped shipment on the goods, and so on. The thief didn't get squat."
Didn't get caught either. Merchant should have shipped "the goods" and had federal marshals "deliver them".
Think of Gaza as basically the South Philly of the Near East. It is a tiny place, densely populated. By provoking a retaliatory attack on their own tiny, densely populated city, the Arabs sealed the fate of innocent civilians. There is no way to wage war in this area without hitting civilian targets. It's not as if there is some big "military/political" sector separate from some "civilian" sector. If you expect Israel to be nicer / more careful after this most recent provocation by the Arabs and the Hamas leadership, you are not paying attention. Israel is saying the line has been drawn and crossed, and they aren't going to back down.
>I seriously doubt many users use a computer 7 days a week, soley on batteries for 8 hours a day!
Well I haven't had an 8 hour battery life *ever*, but why do you doubt it? The whole point of a battery operated portable computer, for some users, is that you can run it on batteries -- which I do for as long as the battery lasts, as do many others. A good battery is an advantage in many situations, where others scramble for the seats near the plugs in meeting rooms or coffee shops or classrooms, or camp in airports in uncomfortable spots, people with good battery life are free.
I see that now, thanks. I'm the type of programmer that looks for numerical solutions to things done with loops. Faced with this problem, I'm pretty sure this is the very last approach I'd take. But then, I haven't done any kind of date code aside from ctime conversion and (lots of) formatting, since about 1980, and I don't have the slightest clue about the Zune environment or what kind of limitations the programmer was up against. The risk of bad Karma precludes me making any remarks on whether or how this should have been tested. I'm not too proud to admit that sillier bugs have left with my signature, and I have respected colleagues who would admit the same.
I won't even comment on the fact that this was an open source project, where the "many eyes" could have seen it coming all the way across the bazaar.
Yep. They can ask him to delete the photos. If he refuses, and the police delete the photos themselves, that's taking it to a new level. On one hand, they are destroying evidence. On another, they are confiscating personal property, which may or may not be the kind of no-no that costs one's badge. And a latent image (digital or film) is potentially valuable property.
There is no reason to believe a lawsuit would prevail, or that a criminal prosecution could succeed, but with enough evidence, it would not necessarily be very expensive to keep the pressure on long enough to make it a better deal for Amtrak to offer a cash settlement. I'd start with allegations of entrapment. Show evidence that the same organization that ASKED you to take photos also was the complainant in your ARREST for taking photos, and maybe leave it at that, and let a jury have it. I bet they'd settle, especially if you can make it so the police officers stand a chance of losing their licensed LEO status.
Occupying an Amtrak platform is possibly not a right, but some train platforms are public places, and some are not.
I have not ridden Amtrak very often, but I have been to train stations that are both publicly and privately owned places.
I'd actually ride the train, but it takes like 50 hours and costs more than $400 between my usual destinations -- a 3 hour flight that can often be purchased for under $150.
>Had the marketing department notified the Amtrak police of the contest we would likely not be talking about this right now.
I want to see sworn depositions from both a marketing exec, and from the highest level of authority in the security department, that this notification was not made. If it turns out the police KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that the company expressly allowed photography, but they harassed and *ARRESTED* a customer anyway, I want to see settlements in the tens of millions, and criminal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy.
I guess the buggy code is O(n) since it is sensitive to input data that it will never receive in practice, so that's sort of irrelevant. The thing that jumps out at me is the use of "while" instead of "if", because it shows the programmer is not quite sure whether there will ever be a 367th day, or worse, that there ever will be more than "366 days". Somebody thinks he is doing the right thing by being overly cautious, but while thinking about what would happen if this routine got "days" as some big number, he should have noticed the bug too.
This is not a good place to be hiding a problem like that -- if some other bug was making the year into some incorrect value, the greedy nature of this loop would hide it, and maybe you'd see it as some kind of "flashes January 1" error that is fixed on reboot.
Maybe there's a patent on correct date routines and MS knows it:-)
>If my microwave had a defective gear in the motor that spins the turny-thing (technical term) that broke after warranty, I >wouldn't expect it to be fixed. Is a defective line of code somewhere really all that different?
If the "turny-thing" failed from the first time you tried to use it, I think you'd want to return it. What does a warranty have to do with it?
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You don't want to impress them *too much*, though. And one thing that can really be problematic is if you've developed a commercial (or potentially commercial) product that competes in a market where your employer has an interest. Another big thing that's been a problem for me and some of my colleagues, if you're "aiming low" because jobs are such slim pickings right now, it shows. It's not necessarily a good thing that you "did X which generated a $40 million annual budget" or you "managed a distributed team of 50 developers." Even I would be tempted to skip past you, saying "we won't be able to keep this person here for a full budget cycle."
Don't "be someone" who can easily get $75/hr contract gigs but is applying for a $45K/year research job. If that's what you're trying to do, there's an art to tailoring your resume to make you not seem overqualified.
"Here's a big part of being a successful IT employee: be mobile. Fully, if possible."
Don't buy a house. Don't be active in a local community. Don't make friends. Don't develop local business relationships. Don't get married. Don't have kids. Don't even get pets.
I don't know how you measure "success."
On one hand, I *am* willing to do "100%" travel if the compensation is good. (But my travel rate is several times my normal rate.)
I had to be very harsh with a persistent recruiter who could not understand why I wasn't motivated to relocate to Salt Lake City Utah (from San Diego California). Sometimes "Being mobile" has a cost that I mark very high.
Everybody at McDonalds starts on fries. You have to work up to grill.
>Go grab a million candlepower spotlight, and aim it at a solar cell across the room. Voila, wattage.
Enough wattage to power a million candlepower spotlight?
The dial turns away from urban idealism and back toward agrarian subsistence. If environmental or political factors are such that subsistence becomes impossible, then some segment of the population literally starves. My great-great grandparents saw this happen in Ireland, so it doesn't seem so far in the distant past to me.
It's more realistic than the god-awful simulator we had in Drivers' Ed in 1979.
>It's the label, not the band that is holding things up.
Isn't it whoever attached Michael Jackson's estate?
In some sense, living in an urban area is itself a type of wealth. Look at it this way - these people may be poor, but if they didn't have the benefits of living within the context of an urban infrastructure, most of them would literally starve and freeze to death.
>Ever tried to watch a hurricane radar image on the radio?
I always make a point of watching those from at least 500 miles away from any ocean.
But that was moved to the Texas Capitol Building - it's still there.
It is equally ridiculous to believe that 100% of the Republican Delegation will devote the entire career to doing nothing but obstructing the Senate, though. That is the implication behind any mention of the fact that the Democrats have fewer than 60 seats. The Republican Party Unity doesn't extend so far as to engender political suicide for any given member, and some of them are not facing healthy prospects in their 2010 election cycle.
Remember, only two, maybe three Republican Senators have to be willing to do something other than participate in a blatant political obstruction, and they are much less coherent than that.
The Senate leadership is equally satisfied with Franken and Burris taking office, those seats being vacant (but uncounted, it's a 98-seat Senate until there is a process by which those seats could be filled), or even with moderate Republicans who are facing election in 2010. The Democrats are not seeking a majority or even hoping for a supermajority anymore. All they need is for one or two Republicans to be less than willing to halt their careers in order to blatantly obstruct the Senate. It's ludicrous to believe they will *all* do that.
>Well, the Macintosh has been playing music since 1984.
My first published computer music was made with an Orchestra-80, in 1980. Before that, I was stuck with abusing the cassette relay and FM radio interference :-)
"Can we calculate how many jobs are lost as the indirect result of pulling $30 billion out of the economy via taxation?"
Roll 2d10 if only CEO jobs are lost.
>Can you just explain to me what that line is, and how Israel expects Hamas to step back?
I don't know how many times Israel offered a truce if Hamas would kindly stop lobbing rockets and mortars into populated areas, but the number of rockets was in the 6000 range. While Hamas was negotiating a truce, they were also digging a tunnel with the purpose of kidnapping Israeli soldiers. Israel doesn't expect them to "step back." Israel expects them to die, and die some more, until maybe, if they happen to step back to the extent that Israel takes notice, maybe the punishment will stop. Maybe not.
>Do you really want to go down that road?
Not I. I do not seriously believe it is in my power to affect this situation.
>Look up what a filibuster is.
In a 98 seat Senate (pefectly legitimate) only 59 votes are required for cloture. Also worth considering, there are more than a few Republicans whose re-election prospects in 2010 are slim enough that they really need to do more during this term than merely play a game of obstruction, doing nothing but voting down cloture motions. What that means is, it's really not as important as has been claimed that the Democrats did not get a supermajority. The first time they try to vote down Cloture, Reid will give the order that the filibuster has to actually take place, and Senators will have to decide whether they want to be shown on C-SPAN sleeping on cots, peeing in bottles, reading phone books, etc., or whether they should let bills get floor votes. I'm satisfied either way.
>On the other hand, the risk seems pretty low.
Three words: Civil Asset Forfeiture.
"As soon as they tried to order something, I noticed. I had the card disabled, the merchant stopped shipment on the goods, and so on. The thief didn't get squat."
Didn't get caught either. Merchant should have shipped "the goods" and had federal marshals "deliver them".
Think of Gaza as basically the South Philly of the Near East. It is a tiny place, densely populated. By provoking a retaliatory attack on their own tiny, densely populated city, the Arabs sealed the fate of innocent civilians. There is no way to wage war in this area without hitting civilian targets. It's not as if there is some big "military/political" sector separate from some "civilian" sector. If you expect Israel to be nicer / more careful after this most recent provocation by the Arabs and the Hamas leadership, you are not paying attention. Israel is saying the line has been drawn and crossed, and they aren't going to back down.
>I seriously doubt many users use a computer 7 days a week, soley on batteries for 8 hours a day!
Well I haven't had an 8 hour battery life *ever*, but why do you doubt it? The whole point of a battery operated portable computer, for some users, is that you can run it on batteries -- which I do for as long as the battery lasts, as do many others. A good battery is an advantage in many situations, where others scramble for the seats near the plugs in meeting rooms or coffee shops or classrooms, or camp in airports in uncomfortable spots, people with good battery life are free.
I see that now, thanks.
I'm the type of programmer that looks for numerical solutions to things done with loops. Faced with this problem, I'm pretty sure this is the very last approach I'd take. But then, I haven't done any kind of date code aside from ctime conversion and (lots of) formatting, since about 1980, and I don't have the slightest clue about the Zune environment or what kind of limitations the programmer was up against. The risk of bad Karma precludes me making any remarks on whether or how this should have been tested. I'm not too proud to admit that sillier bugs have left with my signature, and I have respected colleagues who would admit the same.
I won't even comment on the fact that this was an open source project, where the "many eyes" could have seen it coming all the way across the bazaar.
Yep. They can ask him to delete the photos. If he refuses, and the police delete the photos themselves, that's taking it to a new level. On one hand, they are destroying evidence. On another, they are confiscating personal property, which may or may not be the kind of no-no that costs one's badge. And a latent image (digital or film) is potentially valuable property.
There is no reason to believe a lawsuit would prevail, or that a criminal prosecution could succeed, but with enough evidence, it would not necessarily be very expensive to keep the pressure on long enough to make it a better deal for Amtrak to offer a cash settlement. I'd start with allegations of entrapment. Show evidence that the same organization that ASKED you to take photos also was the complainant in your ARREST for taking photos, and maybe leave it at that, and let a jury have it. I bet they'd settle, especially if you can make it so the police officers stand a chance of losing their licensed LEO status.
>WTF?!! Photography is a RIGHT.
Occupying an Amtrak platform is possibly not a right, but some train platforms are public places, and some are not.
I have not ridden Amtrak very often, but I have been to train stations that are both publicly and privately owned places.
I'd actually ride the train, but it takes like 50 hours and costs more than $400 between my usual destinations -- a 3 hour flight that can often be purchased for under $150.
>Had the marketing department notified the Amtrak police of the contest we would likely not be talking about this right now.
I want to see sworn depositions from both a marketing exec, and from the highest level of authority in the security department, that this notification was not made. If it turns out the police KNEW or SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that the company expressly allowed photography, but they harassed and *ARRESTED* a customer anyway, I want to see settlements in the tens of millions, and criminal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy.
I guess the buggy code is O(n) since it is sensitive to input data that it will
never receive in practice, so that's sort of irrelevant.
The thing that jumps out at me is the use of "while" instead of "if", because
it shows the programmer is not quite sure whether there will ever be a 367th
day, or worse, that there ever will be more than "366 days". Somebody thinks he
is doing the right thing by being overly cautious, but while thinking about what
would happen if this routine got "days" as some big number, he should have noticed
the bug too.
This is not a good place to be hiding a problem like that -- if some other bug was
making the year into some incorrect value, the greedy nature of this loop would hide
it, and maybe you'd see it as some kind of "flashes January 1" error that is fixed on
reboot.
Maybe there's a patent on correct date routines and MS knows it :-)
>If my microwave had a defective gear in the motor that spins the turny-thing (technical term) that broke after warranty, I
>wouldn't expect it to be fixed. Is a defective line of code somewhere really all that different?
If the "turny-thing" failed from the first time you tried to use it, I think you'd want to return it. What does a warranty have to do with it?