EmperorLinux specializes in configuring Linux laptops. And, they maintain a good stock of IBM's.
Their markup is a little high, but their support is excellent.
I haven't purchased from them, yet. But, I bought a support agreement and a depot install from them. I shipped them a latop, and they shipped it back with a fully configured Redhat. Very nice, very easy.
D.
PS - No, I do not work for them, and no they are not friends of mine.
I only have three things to say about this: ThinkPad, ThinkPad, ThinkPad
I'm on my third. I have bought my employees almost a dozen. Absolutely, no hardware issues. Their warranty support is amazing. And, every model so far has run linux extremely well.
I run Fedora Core 5, and everything just works. The only customization I did was to load the fglrx driver for the video (just to see the difference). But, the standard radeon driver does all my day-to-day stuff just fine.
Every single component worked without configuration (WiFi - Cisco, ENet - Intel, Bluetooth, IR, USB 2.0, Suspend, Hibernate). In hindsight, I guess I've never tried my modem.
I'm not getting real good battery life, but my current battery is 3 years old, and I use it a lot.
I find that regardless of vendor, battery performance really starts to drop around 400 charges (1.5 years by my standards).
But, I have the same problems with my laptops.
The only Nokia I've had software issues with was the 6600. It was less stable than Windows 95. I'd frequently get into the mode where it would refuse to hangup a call. I've got one on my desk right now that gets the error "Illegal Function call. Unable to start screensaver."
Running GPRS over bluetooth really seems to give them fits. Not crashing per se, but weird pauses.
The rest of the Nokia's have been rock solid, appliance quality software. No crashes that I can think of except one: the phone that looks like a lipstick case (forget the model number) locked up displaying mapquest.com. It was totally unresponsive. It wouldn't even power down. It was set to auto answer and would receive calls. Pulling the battery and removing the sim didn't change anything. Sent it back to Nokia and got a new one. No problems since. The new one even displays mapquest.com without issue.
I normally don't participate in these discussions, because some Radio Engineer will tell you about dB and wattage, and yet another guy will talk to sound quality with the golden ear of an orchestra conductor.
I on the other hand have the leaden ear of an engineer and the engineering skills of an orchestra conductor. But, I use cell phones a lot. I use my phone around 3500 prime time minutes a month, and I don't have any idea how many non-prime I use. I charge my phone nightly, and it usually needs it. I send over 1000 text messages a month. And, all I care about is how well they work. I don't care about the camera, I don't care about the video games, and I don't care about the lifestyle accessories.
All cellular systems suffer from the flaw that structure, geography and EM interference separate you from their network. That aside, you then look at the robustness of the protocols, the length of talk time, how well they work in noisy environments, what they make your voice sound like on the other end, whether or not you can hear the ring tone, how easy is it to place a call, how easy is it to add a number to the address book.
The really important thing to ask is how well does a given phone and network perform in the places where I need to use it? For me, it's the office, my house, my car and in large international cities. I need a reasonably up to date phone that supports all the network features.
Given these criteria, a GSM world phone is the only phone for me.
The most trying environments for my phone seems to be switching cells in rush hour traffic, my brother's house and a 150 yard stretch between my San Francisco apartment and I-80.
That said, I have settled on T-Mobile, because with them I get the talk time and text message count I need, and their international support is very good (after all my first T-mobile account was in the UK).
Now, onto the question asked. Assuming GSM and T-mobile, my history has led me to the Nokia 6230i.
I have used Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony within these parameters and my conclusions are as follow:
Motorola - Motorola makes by far the best radio. Motorola definitely has two lines of phone: the toy phone, and the serious phone. The toy phones are flimsy pieces of crap. But, their serious phones are rugged workhorses. If all you care about it making calls, they are the best phone out there. Especially their phones with external antennas. The sound quality in noisy environments is good, and the sound quality in quiet environments is excellent. The battery life is good, and their displays are easy to read. But, the displays typically don't tell you much. And the menus and contact management features are almost useless.
Nokia - They are my preferred phone brand. Don't mess with their low end consumer models, and be prepared to shell out the cash from an unlocked phone. But, most of their phones in the 6200, 8000 and 9000 lines are exceptional communication devices. They place and receive calls intuitively. They seem to roam through crowded cells very well. The menu system is designed for a phone not a PDA. The contact management and synchronization tools for windows are pretty good. The sound quality in noisy environments is fair, but reliable. Their sound reproduction in quiet environments is excellent. And, their support is excellent.
Samsung - Of all the brands, I have the least experience with Samsung. I had one as a temporary replacement while I was on vacation. It was small, light and pretty. It received the few calls I needed without any problems, but I did not place many calls. Under normal conditions I had no problems with sound quality, and had no dropped calls. But, again, conditions for that phone were almost ideal. My impression was that it would not have the staying power to survive my usage. But, I have friends who contradict me on this.
Sony - The undisputed king of consumer electronics makes terrible pho
I did not intend to criticize individual instructors. I intended to criticize the system.
Forcing gifted students to sit through the same curriculum as the average student would be the same as forcing average students to attend the Special Education classes for the Educable Menttally Handicapped. It would be torture.
As we trend toward large classes and fewer instructors, we make the education system less and less capable of supporting the intelligent minority.
We spend millions accomodating the mentally handicapped minority, but do relatively little to accomodate a similarly sized mentally gifted minority.
I've gotta say that my elementary school gifted and talented program, honors classes, Advanced Placement, and Academic Decathlon were god-sends to me.
My grades were not particularly good, in general, but I consistently got A's in the classes that were supposedly the most difficult.
I was in constant trouble for not doing homework, or falling asleep in class, or in High School, not showing up for class. But, somehow in AP Biology, AP Spanish, I had perfect attendance and A's.
The gifted environments always had a solid response to "OK, I get it, but what's next." They came up with the next topic, or outlined a study direction that built upon what we just studied.
Most of all the various gifted programs never left the students waiting for something to do.
They never made us feel as though the curriculum was stagnant.
Re:And do we really want to?
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, you see class, you click this underlined word that says "NY Times", and your browser will display a page from the New York Times. If you want to go back to Slashdot, and see the flame war, click that arrow button. Not the one that points right, but the one that points left.
Now, I am going to this with the link that says "http://www.imaluser.com/". Look! The browser now shows us the Luser page.
Now, let's all try clicking on "SourceForge" and see what happens.
For tonight's homework, I want you to click on 4000 addresses, and click the back button to go back to your original page. Turn in your browser history at the beginning of class. Tomorrow, we're gonna talk about the "Forward" button.
For most of us we got the idea at the first example. The rest was excruciating.
That's what arithmetic was to me.
I had it from the first class. It was just clear to me. I had basic addition on day 1. Carrying and multi-digit math, 1 day. Multiplication and division, after the first example.
But, we did hundreds of problems under the premise of a solid foundation.
Long division and multiplication were the worst though. We were expected to show our work, when you could just look at the problem and give the correct answer.
So, instead I read books. I even read an encyclopedia (because I was right beside it, and I could sneak them out). I got in a lot of trouble in class because I never had any idea what was going on. I always finished my schoolwork in 1/10th the time of my class mates, and basically wasted a 5 out of 6 elementary school years waiting for the slow ones to finish reading, or working math problems, or getting that a-ha look on their face.
And, the excuse parents, teachers, counselors and psychiatrists always gave was, "The extra repetition and explanation will give you a solid foundation."
The truth is the extra repetition is just extra repetition if you don't need it.
Extra repetition and detail is great if you are struggling with the basics, and need to reinforce the pattern of the work in your head. Or, if you get hung up on the basic ideas. Or, if you're still sounding out the words in your head. But, once you get it, and you can do 100 repetitions without error, or read 50 pages an hour and understand the content, more repetition is just torture, and it drives the joy out of learning.
Perhaps needless, mind-numbing, detail and repetition are good training for board meetings, or political debates. But, they are not good for productivity and above all they are not good for learning.
I believe that if you can prove proficiency and efficiency in a subject, you should be able to move on.
First of all people in the 99.9th percentile and better (145+) typically have a range of other mental problems, most famously in the social skills area.
That notion that the exceptionally intelligent do not socialize well, or have mental issues that prevent them from socializing, or have weaker constitutions, is increasingly demonstrated to be wrong.
It's time to shed the notion of the uber-nerd weakling non-communicative genius. It's simply not the way it works.
Social skills and impairment, strength and weakness, health and sickness, are evenly distributed with intelligence and stupidity.
The ultra-smart have the same mix as the general population.
I tested pretty smart (99.9%ile+ consistently), and started every football game on offense and defense for 3 out of 4 years.
Outside of scholastics, I was your average guy. Think of it as the stealth smart guy, I never had any tics that marked me as a nerd, but still managed to graduate high school with a football letter jacket, an Academic Decathlon letter jacket, and two years of college credit, and seven 5/5's on the Advanced Placement exams (2 x Spanish, Chemistry, Biology, 2x Computer Science, and English) .
I've come to find out (and the rest of the world is, but slowly), that I am not uncommon among the good testers.
I recommend that X do the exact same thing. The X server should act like DPI is 96 at all times. It would also help if the interfaces to select fonts by pixel size were not treated like second-class citizens.
That would be an extraordinary step backwards!
Correct pixel density is essential for almost everyone trying to do serious graphics or publishing work.
Setting the pixel density correctly allows you to render things
on-screen at the exact same size and proportioons as the printed
work. This is crucial to graphic artists, publishers, et al. Setting
it to 96 DPI all the time, would be miserable in that situation (and
would make many things completely illegible on my 1400x1050 flatpanel,
126x123 DPI).
Incidentally, programs such as The Gimp, Photoshop, Inkscape,
OpenOffice, Scribus, deal with sizes almost exclusively in length
units of measure such as inches, millimeters and points, for graphical
elements as well as type elements.
Most allow you to change the units of the ruler between in, mm, picas and points.
It would be nice if they would add pixels (font size multiplied by correct DPI), and allow the font pickers the same luxury. It would avoid much confusion.
Also, this and color calibration of the things that Macintosh had right from the very beginning; which is why they are so entrenched in the publishing industry.
Nope. He actually came around, and stayed pretty on top of it.
They've switched platforms, so he switched companies.
When he left, they lost a powerful player.
The problem of the slow moving admin
on
Fun With Passwords?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I work as a consultant within a Fortune 100 manufacturer.
During our projects we have to set up a simulation lab and run our project for a few months prior to installing at the factory.
For one project, the lab servers were administered by a person who either did not understand the purpose behind the lab, or simply did not care about our priorities. And, his delays were causing us to run behind schedule.
After some political wrangling, I assumed administrative responsibility of the machines in our test environment.
The months passed, we restored the schedule, and were packing up to head to the job site to install the system, and it was time for me to turnover the systems back to the original admin.
But, he flaked on the meeting, so I'm standing there with root on the lab systems some of which are trusted by outside networks. And, he did not bother to show for the meeting that he called.
So, I set the passwords, and put them in a sealed, unlabeled envelope, and handed them to one of the other admins with whom I had become friends.
The only instructions I gave him were: "You'll know what to do with this when the time comes."
A few weeks later, I got the phone call from my friend talking about the other admin, "He came in here shouting and cussing about how that damn consultant had locked him out of his own systems, then took off without turning over the passwords. I new then that it was time to use the envelope."
Written on the piece of paper in the envelope was one word in block letters: 1nc0mp3t3nt
Yeah, I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one, Bob.
Sony Ericsson phones have lot's of flash, but phones they suck. The display is pretty and eye-candy like screen savers and games are cool. And, it has great connectivity (IRDA and Bluetooth). But, as a telecommunication device they just stink.
All the flash comes at a price, because the phone frequently crashes. I have three different failure modes.
Invalid Mobile The phone dies silently and the banner line reads invalid mobile. This happens approximately once a week. Cycling power and re-entering the PIN corrects the problem.
No Signal The phone has zero signal strenght even in areas with known good signal. This happens twice a week. Cycling power fixes
Self Power Off Sitting on a table (normally on my bedside table when I've relied on it as an alarm clock) it will power itself off. This happens only occasionally. You have to remove the battery to get it to work again.
Also, as a telephone call placing instrument, I find that it has numerous usability problems.
No notification for failed calls
When originating calls it says connecting, then goes back to the main screen with no user notification whatever. Which means you cannot dial, then hold the phone to your ear to wait to connect. You have to watch the screen until it connects.
You cannot edit a keyed number
You have to attempt the call, then on redial you can edit your keyed number.
The phonebook is incredibly slow
I have hundreds of contacts, and scrolling the list takes seconds to refresh. It is painful looking for a name.
Keypresses are queued (sometimes)
Remembering that the user interface is very slow, the phone queues keypresses. This could be good. But, when answering a call (for instance), your press the yes/off-hook key you get no response from the UI, so you press it again. Well about 3 out of 5 calls get answered and put immediately on hold by my impatient thumb.
The joystick is fragile
If you carry the phone in a pocket, you can easily jam the joystick either into the select position or a direction. This makes the UI behave even stranger. Or, while scrolling down the list, it will get stuck and overshoot what you were looking for.
I have found that these results are consistent among the various T series phones. I have a new T68i (two months old). My brother has the T300. And, friends with various other generations.
My next phone will be a Nokia. My Nokia 8890 was the best phone I've ever owned. I'm looking at a 6610 as the replacement for my T68i.
During these trying times, I find myself in the all to familiar situation of being over-employed. With the scarcity of people that do what I do and the number of projects looming on the horizon, I just can't manage to find the time to take off.
Any recommendations on recruiting habits, and work habits to help me out of this bad situation?
Careful about that internet speed snap-judgement!
For a lot of folks (myself included) the
T-Mobile Wireless Broadband
is a cheap and handy way to get my high speed internet.
I travel almost constantly, so having home-based broadband was not serving
me very well. The service provider
T-mobile charges a fixed
price (about the same as broad band) for access at all its partner locations.
So far, they are in Starbucks, American Airlines, and several hotel chains. Pretty much wherever I go around the country, I am a short drive to a point of presence.
Also, some locations
are very, very fast. At the Starbucks down the street from my work site in
Houston, I downloaded all 5 CD's of Red Hat 7.3 in under 3 hours. It beats
the crap out of dialing out through the hotel PBX.
Finally, as long as the two networks are using different SSID's why does it
matter? You have a 11 Mb pipe no matter how you slice it. The two should
be able to share the waves without problems.
Is it so bad to pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee, and $0.50 for refills, while you surf and do your big downloads? The soundtrack sucks, but headphones fix that! And, someone else cleans up afterwards.
I have set up bar code, magstripe and card printing under other unices. It's not all that difficult. Even for a non-programmer.
The most important thing is that most of these printers are not set up to be a normal page oriented printer. They are designed from the ground up to print the same label/card/template thousands and thousands of times.
To that end, they almost all have the ability to store a template in the printer. So, to generate a card, all you have to to is send the contents of the fields in the template, and it does the rest. Also, to make cosmetic changes to the card style, all you have to do is update the template.
If the printer has a programming manual (and almost all in that genre do). It is usually a fairly simple serial text based language. They usually have instructions for drawing rectangles, and ellipses of various styles, plus instructions for putting text of various styles in a certain location. Bitmaps are sent as text much like an.XPM file.
let Again=1 while [ "$Again" -eq 1 ] do
cat printfile.txt >/dev/ttyS1
echo Try to print again (y/N)?
read Response
if [ "$Response" = "y" ]
then
let Again=1
else
let Again=0
fi done
Most laptops come with an OEM version of the most common operating system and productivity suites. This is usually licensed to the hardware not the individual.
Small foot print.
Portable and durable.
Most will charge from a 12 VDC power supply.
Non-computer users find them less intimidating.
The disadvantages are:
Proprietary hardware, means OS upgrades and/or alternate OS's are difficult.
Cost per unit is higher.
Fewer user serviceable parts.
Many companies donate laptops to charity or sell them in bulk when they are only a few years old. So, you can pick them up used, for cheap or free.
You can purchase refurbished notebooks (with warranty) from the usual suspects for about $1100/ea.
You can pick up brand new off-brand models for about $1100 (like winbook).
Given your source of power and your premium on space, give cheap laptops a shot.
College Dropouts: Successful college dropouts that find
work in the industry tend to have skills and determination that overcome the
stigma of being a dropout, but without the salary potential.
Corporate Dropouts: People who leave established positions to work
independently tend to be self-starters who are tired of working without
tangible goals; they tend to move to an environment with shorter term
closure. They will want discrete problems to solve and move on.
On-Site Experience: Programmer types who have worked in
the crucible of the customer site, tend to be much more results oriented
than the ivory tower style developer.
Troubleshooting Experience: Ask potential candidates
about their experience debugging other peoples projects. Saying that they
had to rewrite it completely may be a bad sign; this to often indicates a
'Not-Invented-Here' attitude that simply does not work on teams.
Saying that they used off-the-shelf tools, hardware investigation to solve
the problem is the making of a good sign. Hearing that they worked to
diagnose and prove the problem before they started fixing it is very
important.
Development Standards: As software development is probably not your
primary goal, make sure that your new hire is knows and has used some sort
of methodology in their projects. These standards provide a sort of
checklist to make sure that the right kinds of questions are asked of the
right people.
Project Management: Some project management experience is a must for
a small shop. All software development has a life-cycle. Managing that
life-cycle, predicting the times in the cycle, and producing good answers to
the Quality-Expense-Features equation are essential to producing good and
timely software.
Team Development: Communication skills are often undervalued for
small shops and small projects. But, the person you hire has a
responsibility to communicate their activity to other members of the
project, developers within his team, future members of the team, and the
person that inherits the project in the future. Look for developers
with well-documented code samples, examples of requirements documents,
experience with revision control and team development tools.
"How do I find candidates?"
I believe that you have done it. So many of us in this industry are sick
and tired of the constant travel, the irresponsible deadlines, repetitive
problems, and lack of a worthwhile goals. I for one would be very
interested in putting my brain to use solving good problems with good goals,
that I would be willing to take a pay cut to do it.
It seems blazingly inept that the FBI would offer a binary of a tool expected to run as root, that does something cloak-and-dagger to the linux community.
They have seriously forgotten how skeptical this audience is.
Slashdot Mirror
EmperorLinux specializes in configuring Linux laptops. And, they maintain a good stock of IBM's.
Their markup is a little high, but their support is excellent.
I haven't purchased from them, yet. But, I bought a support agreement and a depot install from them. I shipped them a latop, and they shipped it back with a fully configured Redhat. Very nice, very easy.
D.
PS - No, I do not work for them, and no they are not friends of mine.
I'm on my third. I have bought my employees almost a dozen. Absolutely, no hardware issues. Their warranty support is amazing. And, every model so far has run linux extremely well.
I run Fedora Core 5, and everything just works. The only customization I did was to load the fglrx driver for the video (just to see the difference). But, the standard radeon driver does all my day-to-day stuff just fine.
Every single component worked without configuration (WiFi - Cisco, ENet - Intel, Bluetooth, IR, USB 2.0, Suspend, Hibernate). In hindsight, I guess I've never tried my modem.
I'm not getting real good battery life, but my current battery is 3 years old, and I use it a lot.
D.
But, I have the same problems with my laptops.
The only Nokia I've had software issues with was the 6600. It was less stable than Windows 95. I'd frequently get into the mode where it would refuse to hangup a call. I've got one on my desk right now that gets the error "Illegal Function call. Unable to start screensaver."
Running GPRS over bluetooth really seems to give them fits. Not crashing per se, but weird pauses.
The rest of the Nokia's have been rock solid, appliance quality software. No crashes that I can think of except one: the phone that looks like a lipstick case (forget the model number) locked up displaying mapquest.com. It was totally unresponsive. It wouldn't even power down. It was set to auto answer and would receive calls. Pulling the battery and removing the sim didn't change anything. Sent it back to Nokia and got a new one. No problems since. The new one even displays mapquest.com without issue.
I on the other hand have the leaden ear of an engineer and the engineering skills of an orchestra conductor. But, I use cell phones a lot. I use my phone around 3500 prime time minutes a month, and I don't have any idea how many non-prime I use. I charge my phone nightly, and it usually needs it. I send over 1000 text messages a month. And, all I care about is how well they work. I don't care about the camera, I don't care about the video games, and I don't care about the lifestyle accessories.
All cellular systems suffer from the flaw that structure, geography and EM interference separate you from their network. That aside, you then look at the robustness of the protocols, the length of talk time, how well they work in noisy environments, what they make your voice sound like on the other end, whether or not you can hear the ring tone, how easy is it to place a call, how easy is it to add a number to the address book.
The really important thing to ask is how well does a given phone and network perform in the places where I need to use it? For me, it's the office, my house, my car and in large international cities. I need a reasonably up to date phone that supports all the network features.
Given these criteria, a GSM world phone is the only phone for me.
The most trying environments for my phone seems to be switching cells in rush hour traffic, my brother's house and a 150 yard stretch between my San Francisco apartment and I-80.
That said, I have settled on T-Mobile, because with them I get the talk time and text message count I need, and their international support is very good (after all my first T-mobile account was in the UK).
Now, onto the question asked. Assuming GSM and T-mobile, my history has led me to the Nokia 6230i.
I have used Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony within these parameters and my conclusions are as follow:
But, I turned it all back on, and
<SQUEAL> OMG I LUV IT! </SQUEAL>
I'm telling all my girlfriends to do their site just like this. It is so t3h cuteness!
XOXOXOXOXO
Friends 4-Ever!
It's soooo special, I almost cried.
Actually, I am crying.
And a little nauseous.
Oral-history (mmm . . .) now that's sexy; I'll remember that forever!
I believe this is my point proven.
I did not intend to criticize individual instructors. I intended to criticize the system.
Forcing gifted students to sit through the same curriculum as the average student would be the same as forcing average students to attend the Special Education classes for the Educable Menttally Handicapped. It would be torture.
As we trend toward large classes and fewer instructors, we make the education system less and less capable of supporting the intelligent minority.
We spend millions accomodating the mentally handicapped minority, but do relatively little to accomodate a similarly sized mentally gifted minority.
And how!
I've gotta say that my elementary school gifted and talented program, honors classes, Advanced Placement, and Academic Decathlon were god-sends to me.
My grades were not particularly good, in general, but I consistently got A's in the classes that were supposedly the most difficult.
I was in constant trouble for not doing homework, or falling asleep in class, or in High School, not showing up for class. But, somehow in AP Biology, AP Spanish, I had perfect attendance and A's.
The gifted environments always had a solid response to "OK, I get it, but what's next." They came up with the next topic, or outlined a study direction that built upon what we just studied.
Most of all the various gifted programs never left the students waiting for something to do.
They never made us feel as though the curriculum was stagnant.
For most of us we got the idea at the first example. The rest was excruciating.
That's what arithmetic was to me.
I had it from the first class. It was just clear to me. I had basic addition on day 1. Carrying and multi-digit math, 1 day. Multiplication and division, after the first example.
But, we did hundreds of problems under the premise of a solid foundation.
Long division and multiplication were the worst though. We were expected to show our work, when you could just look at the problem and give the correct answer.
So, instead I read books. I even read an encyclopedia (because I was right beside it, and I could sneak them out). I got in a lot of trouble in class because I never had any idea what was going on. I always finished my schoolwork in 1/10th the time of my class mates, and basically wasted a 5 out of 6 elementary school years waiting for the slow ones to finish reading, or working math problems, or getting that a-ha look on their face.
And, the excuse parents, teachers, counselors and psychiatrists always gave was, "The extra repetition and explanation will give you a solid foundation."
The truth is the extra repetition is just extra repetition if you don't need it.
Extra repetition and detail is great if you are struggling with the basics, and need to reinforce the pattern of the work in your head. Or, if you get hung up on the basic ideas. Or, if you're still sounding out the words in your head. But, once you get it, and you can do 100 repetitions without error, or read 50 pages an hour and understand the content, more repetition is just torture, and it drives the joy out of learning.
Perhaps needless, mind-numbing, detail and repetition are good training for board meetings, or political debates. But, they are not good for productivity and above all they are not good for learning.
I believe that if you can prove proficiency and efficiency in a subject, you should be able to move on.
That notion that the exceptionally intelligent do not socialize well, or have mental issues that prevent them from socializing, or have weaker constitutions, is increasingly demonstrated to be wrong.
It's time to shed the notion of the uber-nerd weakling non-communicative genius. It's simply not the way it works.
Social skills and impairment, strength and weakness, health and sickness, are evenly distributed with intelligence and stupidity.
The ultra-smart have the same mix as the general population.
I tested pretty smart (99.9%ile+ consistently), and started every football game on offense and defense for 3 out of 4 years.
Outside of scholastics, I was your average guy. Think of it as the stealth smart guy, I never had any tics that marked me as a nerd, but still managed to graduate high school with a football letter jacket, an Academic Decathlon letter jacket, and two years of college credit, and seven 5/5's on the Advanced Placement exams (2 x Spanish, Chemistry, Biology, 2x Computer Science, and English) .
I've come to find out (and the rest of the world is, but slowly), that I am not uncommon among the good testers.
Correct pixel density is essential for almost everyone trying to do serious graphics or publishing work.
Setting the pixel density correctly allows you to render things on-screen at the exact same size and proportioons as the printed work. This is crucial to graphic artists, publishers, et al. Setting it to 96 DPI all the time, would be miserable in that situation (and would make many things completely illegible on my 1400x1050 flatpanel, 126x123 DPI).
Incidentally, programs such as The Gimp, Photoshop, Inkscape, OpenOffice, Scribus, deal with sizes almost exclusively in length units of measure such as inches, millimeters and points, for graphical elements as well as type elements.
Most allow you to change the units of the ruler between in, mm, picas and points.
It would be nice if they would add pixels (font size multiplied by correct DPI), and allow the font pickers the same luxury. It would avoid much confusion.
Also, this and color calibration of the things that Macintosh had right from the very beginning; which is why they are so entrenched in the publishing industry.
They've switched platforms, so he switched companies.
When he left, they lost a powerful player.
I work as a consultant within a Fortune 100 manufacturer.
During our projects we have to set up a simulation lab and run our project for a few months prior to installing at the factory.
For one project, the lab servers were administered by a person who either did not understand the purpose behind the lab, or simply did not care about our priorities. And, his delays were causing us to run behind schedule.
After some political wrangling, I assumed administrative responsibility of the machines in our test environment.
The months passed, we restored the schedule, and were packing up to head to the job site to install the system, and it was time for me to turnover the systems back to the original admin.
But, he flaked on the meeting, so I'm standing there with root on the lab systems some of which are trusted by outside networks. And, he did not bother to show for the meeting that he called.
So, I set the passwords, and put them in a sealed, unlabeled envelope, and handed them to one of the other admins with whom I had become friends.
The only instructions I gave him were: "You'll know what to do with this when the time comes."
A few weeks later, I got the phone call from my friend talking about the other admin, "He came in here shouting and cussing about how that damn consultant had locked him out of his own systems, then took off without turning over the passwords. I new then that it was time to use the envelope."
Written on the piece of paper in the envelope was one word in block letters: 1nc0mp3t3nt
Except, run them off, of course.
Sony Ericsson phones have lot's of flash, but phones they suck. The display is pretty and eye-candy like screen savers and games are cool. And, it has great connectivity (IRDA and Bluetooth). But, as a telecommunication device they just stink.
All the flash comes at a price, because the phone frequently crashes. I have three different failure modes.
Invalid Mobile The phone dies silently and the banner line reads invalid mobile. This happens approximately once a week. Cycling power and re-entering the PIN corrects the problem.
No Signal The phone has zero signal strenght even in areas with known good signal. This happens twice a week. Cycling power fixes
Self Power Off Sitting on a table (normally on my bedside table when I've relied on it as an alarm clock) it will power itself off. This happens only occasionally. You have to remove the battery to get it to work again. Also, as a telephone call placing instrument, I find that it has numerous usability problems.
No notification for failed calls
When originating calls it says connecting, then goes back to the main screen with no user notification whatever. Which means you cannot dial, then hold the phone to your ear to wait to connect. You have to watch the screen until it connects.
You cannot edit a keyed number
You have to attempt the call, then on redial you can edit your keyed number.
The phonebook is incredibly slow
I have hundreds of contacts, and scrolling the list takes seconds to refresh. It is painful looking for a name.
Keypresses are queued (sometimes)
Remembering that the user interface is very slow, the phone queues keypresses. This could be good. But, when answering a call (for instance), your press the yes/off-hook key you get no response from the UI, so you press it again. Well about 3 out of 5 calls get answered and put immediately on hold by my impatient thumb.
The joystick is fragile
If you carry the phone in a pocket, you can easily jam the joystick either into the select position or a direction. This makes the UI behave even stranger. Or, while scrolling down the list, it will get stuck and overshoot what you were looking for.
I have found that these results are consistent among the various T series phones. I have a new T68i (two months old). My brother has the T300. And, friends with various other generations.
My next phone will be a Nokia. My Nokia 8890 was the best phone I've ever owned. I'm looking at a 6610 as the replacement for my T68i.
No! There are no pointers in java!
familiar situation of being over-employed. With the
scarcity of people that do what I do and the number
of projects looming on the horizon, I just can't manage
to find the time to take off.
Any recommendations on recruiting habits, and work
habits to help me out of this bad situation?
I travel almost constantly, so having home-based broadband was not serving me very well. The service provider T-mobile charges a fixed price (about the same as broad band) for access at all its partner locations. So far, they are in Starbucks, American Airlines, and several hotel chains. Pretty much wherever I go around the country, I am a short drive to a point of presence.
Also, some locations are very, very fast. At the Starbucks down the street from my work site in Houston, I downloaded all 5 CD's of Red Hat 7.3 in under 3 hours. It beats the crap out of dialing out through the hotel PBX.
Finally, as long as the two networks are using different SSID's why does it matter? You have a 11 Mb pipe no matter how you slice it. The two should be able to share the waves without problems.
Is it so bad to pay $1.50 for a cup of coffee, and $0.50 for refills, while you surf and do your big downloads? The soundtrack sucks, but headphones fix that! And, someone else cleans up afterwards.
The most important thing is that most of these printers are not set up to be a normal page oriented printer. They are designed from the ground up to print the same label/card/template thousands and thousands of times.
To that end, they almost all have the ability to store a template in the printer. So, to generate a card, all you have to to is send the contents of the fields in the template, and it does the rest. Also, to make cosmetic changes to the card style, all you have to do is update the template.
If the printer has a programming manual (and almost all in that genre do). It is usually a fairly simple serial text based language. They usually have instructions for drawing rectangles, and ellipses of various styles, plus instructions for putting text of various styles in a certain location. Bitmaps are sent as text much like an
To configure a printer you can
Then to print a card you set up a script like:
But, thanks for asking.
nntp? Usenet News?
What does yahoo groups offer that nn does not?
Most laptops come with an OEM version of the most common operating system and productivity suites. This is usually licensed to the hardware not the individual.
Small foot print.
Portable and durable.
Most will charge from a 12 VDC power supply.
Non-computer users find them less intimidating.
The disadvantages are:
Proprietary hardware, means OS upgrades and/or alternate OS's are difficult.
Cost per unit is higher.
Fewer user serviceable parts.
Many companies donate laptops to charity or sell them in bulk when they are only a few years old. So, you can pick them up used, for cheap or free.
You can purchase refurbished notebooks (with warranty) from the usual suspects for about $1100/ea.
You can pick up brand new off-brand models for about $1100 (like winbook).
Given your source of power and your premium on space, give cheap laptops a shot.
"How to know if they are qualified?"
"How do I find candidates?"
I believe that you have done it. So many of us in this industry are sick and tired of the constant travel, the irresponsible deadlines, repetitive problems, and lack of a worthwhile goals. I for one would be very interested in putting my brain to use solving good problems with good goals, that I would be willing to take a pay cut to do it.
It seems blazingly inept that the FBI would offer a binary of a tool expected to run as root, that does something cloak-and-dagger to the linux community.
They have seriously forgotten how skeptical this audience is.
It really amazes me. Really it does.