Applied critical thinking is how you solve problems. What an engineer does on a daily basis is to take a problem and attempt to come up with an approach for solving that problem. Critical thinking is what philosophy is all about. In many ways, computer science is a specialized hybrid of philosophy and mathematics, and strength in both will definitely make you more effective as a developer and a designer.
I've worked for a lot of mid-sized companies that had their IT guy right there. When I had a problem with something, they'd come up and fix it.
However, I'm now working for a global corporation with their call center located in India. When my domain login gets hosed (which seems to happen every week for some unexplainable reason), I can't get into my dev laptop without calling them and having them inform me that I need to log into the intranet password reset page. Of course, it's so obvious, only, I can't get onto the domain so I can even get onto the corp intranet in the first place! Then they decide to put me through to some other team located elsewhere. At this point, I might just as well call it a day, or sit on my hands for the next 3-4 hours. The cost to the company of having a developer sit around for a few hours pretty much makes up that difference that the company saves by having their IT guys offshored. Seriously, when this stuff happened at other places I've worked, they'd have it fixed in about 5-10 minutes, long enough for me to grab some coffee. Those guys typically made about 1/4 - 1/3 what I made on the average, so yeah, it was ending up costing the company as much money as they would have saved.
I've been kicking it around for years. It has nothing to do with being lazy, it has everything to do with protecting yourself from managers who questionably violate labor laws without ending up with you being fired. Especially if you're right out of college and you have no idea what to do when your manager tries to work you 70-80 hours a week with no overtime. That's basically a sweatshop, but it definitely happens and I've been in that situation.
Of course, those who've been around the industry for years and have built up a reputation...and thus, have no difficulty switching jobs and/or maintaining work will obviously not see anything wrong. However, when I broke into the industry after college, I took a software development job with a Fortune 500 thinking it would be good experience...and I was paid like crap. And disposed of like crap after a year of hard work that generally met or surpassed most expectations. I mean, I got a good letter of recommendation out of it...which got me another job that lasted a year, and I was laid off (and even had that company try and contest my unemployment benefits).
I saw a lot of other guys fare much worse in the first few years, guys who I knew weren't bad engineers at all...maybe not the best suckups, but they got their work done. However, young engineers are seen as a dime a dozen by management, and are easily replaceable. Heck, even after working in the industry for years, I've had to get dirty in legal fights for paychecks with various telecommute contracts I've had.
Another thing unions can do is prevent companies from forcing employees to work ridiculous work weeks, so potentially, they can mate and reproduce. They can prevent managers from working visaholders like literal slaves, then holding them up as examples to force their citizenship holding employees into working similiar hours (many times for nothing). Instead of hiring engineers on full-time with the full intent of requiring them to work more than 40 hours a week, they would need to hire them on as contract or provide for overtime. (Or at least give the employee someone to report such behavior to other than the labor department...which can make things really ugly when it's you against your company.)
There are a lot of good benefits to being unionized, as long as the union isn't too horribly corrupt. Most engineers can join the AFL-CIO, however...well, that sort of fails that requirement.
This, from the article, is probably where he's getting the assumption:
The team's biggest hurdle was tuning the frequency of the beam to infrared, the frequency most used in optoelectronics and fibre optic cables.
Obviously though, from the article yet again:
"People are making all kinds of optoelectronic components, but the missing piece has been the laser source," Sargent says. "This is the first paint-on semiconductor laser - it could be used to connect microprocessors" in an optical computer.
That seems to be the point of this particular discovery.
I found that the more highly permeable lenses made my eyes dry out much more quickly than the lesser permeable lenses. (Duh...) I used to get seriously bad redeye with the Boston Sevens. I still get some dryness, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Anyway, switching to Boston Fives is kind of a lite fix that shouldn't require too many visits to the optometrist and too much extra hit on the pocketbook. If you or anyone else has Boston Sevens right now, anyway.
I had one of the first Koolance cases they released. It was amazing for about a year. Then one day, I went to swap out a hard drive, and I must have cracked one of the nozzles. A day later, I had green coolant leaking out of my machine. Luckily, nothing sprayed out or splashed around...much, and my hardware was all working fine. Well, I was stuck ordering a new water pump. After a year of that, the stupid thing started leaking...again. I had noticed that the temperatures had been steadily climbing, so I went to check the inside of my box. Turns out, the new metal nozzle wasn't quite as snug as the old molded plastic one from the original pump, and there was a crystallized formation growing on the hose that opened up a crack in it.
Anyway, I replaced both of my boxes with 100 dollar Aspire X-Cruiser cases with Zalman GPU fans. They keep my stuff just about as cool, are reasonably quiet...and best yet, the analog backlit meters on the front provide a wonderful blue glow that lights up my living room at night.:)
It looks like an attempt made by a company that wants to leech off some cash from various wireless APs, but wants to appease the/. community by giving it's product plans names like "Linus" and "Bill".
I bought a Seagate drive 2 weeks ago. It came with a SATA cable. It's incredibly quiet, really fast, and simply a great hard drive value.
I also bought 2 other Seagate drives a year ago. They've been running 24-7 and have not crashed once.
...your code has a chance of sticking around for awhile, as in there may be a chance someone might have to update some of it in several years down the line. If you don't comment that, then someone, somewhere (if it's not you yourself) will curse you onto infinity.
Well-written code is truely in the eye of the beholder, and is subjective to current trends, personal preferences, etc.
Ahh, typical XP newbies. The problem with most companies new to XP is they still want to do things the traditional way, ie., do it before a specified cutoff date. However, XP requires continuous releases, and Scrum is all about timeboxing each release. Soo...they probably tried to get too much done in too little time, went over the limit, realized that what they had wasn't acceptable, broke the XP rules, made some hasty fixes, disabled some harder to fix features, and got it out the door late anyway. The only reason I know that is because I've been through that.
XP isn't a magical cookie cutter solution you can just apply and expect instant $$, you pretty much have to build your team around it from the ground up, have experienced XP people around, etc. In fact, it really only works if the top level management really buys into it.
That's nice and very positive, but I know I'd definitely not want to give up my freedom to criticize a company or product openly, for fear of legal reprimand. "Here, have this right to the freedom of speech, until your internet service provider catches wind of you complaining about bad service and interprets it as a disparaging attack on their company/product."
I'd love to see companies use this sort of tool to improve their services/products as a form of feedback. However, that costs the company money/time that they can otherwise obtain more freely through legal recourse. As far as using it as a search, it also sounds like the perfect blogspamming tool.
If it makes it out to the market, there's a pretty good chance of PalmOS with the MontaVista kernel doing what MacOS X did for desktop/laptop computing awhile back. In fact, it may even push Linux further into the consumer market, despite Palm releasing their WinMob Treo. Devices running PalmOS are often cheaper than devices running WinMob...whereas it's usually the opposite with Macs vs. PCs. Anyway, I saw a demo of it (Palm/Linux) running on a phone during the last Palmsource, cool stuff.
I like the idea being able to hit a website from my handheld, knowing beforehand that it'll render decently. Instead of wasting my time/battery/in some cases data minutes waiting for some website to NOT render properly, just so I can know in the future that it doesn't work and not go back there. Plus, the mobile browsers that do so hopefully wouldn't have to spend so much overhead clipping down pages to make them render better.
I just don't like it because like most modern IDEs, it tries to do a lot of rubbish behind the scenes that I just don't want it to do.
All I want is to make some folders, drop some files in, and save that as a project file. No active working project directory nonsense, no saved user preferences hidden file that I always have to remove manually from CVS, none of that junk. I just want to click on a project file, and have my project opened. I don't need to see a tree view of all my classes and resources either.
If I want to build or run tests through my IDE, I want to drop the path to the script file I've made to do that.
Intellisense isn't really a good replacement for the API reference/object browser, which I still usually keep open while developing if I'm stuck using VS. I hate playing the.NET guessing game with the intellisense menus. I'm not a seasoned.NET developer as I work on several mobile native platforms (split between C, C++, Java, and C#).
I work on several different mobile platforms, switching APIs and build environments constantly, and the one IDE on Windows I've always found that does exactly what I want is UltraEdit-32.
The Thunderbird email database is basically in Eudora mbox format. It usually works, but I've had situations where it has problems. Basically, you have to locate your Thunderbird profile in your Documents and Settings/Application data/...Thunderbird/profilename whatever directory, find the account you want to import, then import the Inbox as Eudora mail.
If you have any more questions about Thunderbird, search the archives at MozillaZine.org./. is probably not the best place to ask technical support questions.
You do realize, there's a free version of Trillian as well that does almost everything the Pro version does, right? The pro version adds video chat, Jabber, Rendezvous, and Novell Groupwise, and that's about it. I know I don't really have any use for those, (all my friends seem to have burned out on jabber), and most of us geeks would rather not use video chat. Especially after 10 hours of coding, 5 slices of cold pizza, and some mountain dew. I know I don't want my girlfriend seeing me like that.:(
Stay specialized and ahead of the curve
on
Offshoring IT
·
· Score: 1
Probably shouldn't be replying to so many offtopics, but I'd suggest staying one step ahead of what the overwhelming majority of the crowd overseas is doing. I've done that over the years by going from contract to contract specializing in whatever platform is just starting to get big (in my case, I develop mostly for mobile devices, but there are a lot of jobs out there for other platforms, especially various embedded sys or point of sale systems dev that haven't jumped into the outsourcing ring for various reasons yet).
Most of those developers overseas have a simple strategy, get proficient with the most popular language around, and jobs will come to you because you're cheap. The only way we're going to be able to find consistent work is to stay on the cutting edge, get somewhat specialized, and be flexible towards moving around and taking short term contracts here and there. Being a salesman is one thing, but if you really want to code, and your heart is set in spending some crazy hours doing so, then that's the only way I can see that someone can keep employed relatively consistently. (At least, that's how I've done it over my several year career. Getting a degree in Software Engineering probably helped me more than a CS degree as well, in retrospect, but obviously there's not much you can do about that now.) Also, as a last note, get really good at tech and interpersonal communications writing. My tech writing skills have extended several of my contracts over the years, the payback for me has been pretty respectable. Writing good, informative emails has helped make managers more inclined to keep me around as well.
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Applied critical thinking is how you solve problems. What an engineer does on a daily basis is to take a problem and attempt to come up with an approach for solving that problem. Critical thinking is what philosophy is all about. In many ways, computer science is a specialized hybrid of philosophy and mathematics, and strength in both will definitely make you more effective as a developer and a designer.
I've worked for a lot of mid-sized companies that had their IT guy right there. When I had a problem with something, they'd come up and fix it. However, I'm now working for a global corporation with their call center located in India. When my domain login gets hosed (which seems to happen every week for some unexplainable reason), I can't get into my dev laptop without calling them and having them inform me that I need to log into the intranet password reset page. Of course, it's so obvious, only, I can't get onto the domain so I can even get onto the corp intranet in the first place! Then they decide to put me through to some other team located elsewhere. At this point, I might just as well call it a day, or sit on my hands for the next 3-4 hours. The cost to the company of having a developer sit around for a few hours pretty much makes up that difference that the company saves by having their IT guys offshored. Seriously, when this stuff happened at other places I've worked, they'd have it fixed in about 5-10 minutes, long enough for me to grab some coffee. Those guys typically made about 1/4 - 1/3 what I made on the average, so yeah, it was ending up costing the company as much money as they would have saved.
That's exactly what the old Tapwave Zodiac had... :)
I've been kicking it around for years. It has nothing to do with being lazy, it has everything to do with protecting yourself from managers who questionably violate labor laws without ending up with you being fired. Especially if you're right out of college and you have no idea what to do when your manager tries to work you 70-80 hours a week with no overtime. That's basically a sweatshop, but it definitely happens and I've been in that situation.
Of course, those who've been around the industry for years and have built up a reputation...and thus, have no difficulty switching jobs and/or maintaining work will obviously not see anything wrong. However, when I broke into the industry after college, I took a software development job with a Fortune 500 thinking it would be good experience...and I was paid like crap. And disposed of like crap after a year of hard work that generally met or surpassed most expectations. I mean, I got a good letter of recommendation out of it...which got me another job that lasted a year, and I was laid off (and even had that company try and contest my unemployment benefits).
I saw a lot of other guys fare much worse in the first few years, guys who I knew weren't bad engineers at all...maybe not the best suckups, but they got their work done. However, young engineers are seen as a dime a dozen by management, and are easily replaceable. Heck, even after working in the industry for years, I've had to get dirty in legal fights for paychecks with various telecommute contracts I've had.
Another thing unions can do is prevent companies from forcing employees to work ridiculous work weeks, so potentially, they can mate and reproduce. They can prevent managers from working visaholders like literal slaves, then holding them up as examples to force their citizenship holding employees into working similiar hours (many times for nothing). Instead of hiring engineers on full-time with the full intent of requiring them to work more than 40 hours a week, they would need to hire them on as contract or provide for overtime. (Or at least give the employee someone to report such behavior to other than the labor department...which can make things really ugly when it's you against your company.)
There are a lot of good benefits to being unionized, as long as the union isn't too horribly corrupt. Most engineers can join the AFL-CIO, however...well, that sort of fails that requirement.
Replace hydroxyl ions with x, and salicylic acids with y, and you'll be laughing along with all us scientists, Mr. Mathmatician.
This is totally making my Easter...a flame war between Canadians and Australians, all fueling a thread created by an obvious troll.
I found that the more highly permeable lenses made my eyes dry out much more quickly than the lesser permeable lenses. (Duh...) I used to get seriously bad redeye with the Boston Sevens. I still get some dryness, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.
Anyway, switching to Boston Fives is kind of a lite fix that shouldn't require too many visits to the optometrist and too much extra hit on the pocketbook. If you or anyone else has Boston Sevens right now, anyway.
I had one of the first Koolance cases they released. It was amazing for about a year. Then one day, I went to swap out a hard drive, and I must have cracked one of the nozzles. A day later, I had green coolant leaking out of my machine. Luckily, nothing sprayed out or splashed around...much, and my hardware was all working fine. Well, I was stuck ordering a new water pump. After a year of that, the stupid thing started leaking...again. I had noticed that the temperatures had been steadily climbing, so I went to check the inside of my box. Turns out, the new metal nozzle wasn't quite as snug as the old molded plastic one from the original pump, and there was a crystallized formation growing on the hose that opened up a crack in it. Anyway, I replaced both of my boxes with 100 dollar Aspire X-Cruiser cases with Zalman GPU fans. They keep my stuff just about as cool, are reasonably quiet...and best yet, the analog backlit meters on the front provide a wonderful blue glow that lights up my living room at night. :)
It looks like an attempt made by a company that wants to leech off some cash from various wireless APs, but wants to appease the /. community by giving it's product plans names like "Linus" and "Bill".
Bah, Quartz was so two years ago. Symbian doesn't even call their own UI "Quartz" anymore, they call it UIQ. Get with the times, Apple and M$.
I bought a Seagate drive 2 weeks ago. It came with a SATA cable. It's incredibly quiet, really fast, and simply a great hard drive value. I also bought 2 other Seagate drives a year ago. They've been running 24-7 and have not crashed once.
...your code has a chance of sticking around for awhile, as in there may be a chance someone might have to update some of it in several years down the line. If you don't comment that, then someone, somewhere (if it's not you yourself) will curse you onto infinity.
Well-written code is truely in the eye of the beholder, and is subjective to current trends, personal preferences, etc.
I saw an early prototype of it demoed back at Palmsource in May. The ship date was supposed to be Q2 next year, I thought.
Ahh, typical XP newbies. The problem with most companies new to XP is they still want to do things the traditional way, ie., do it before a specified cutoff date. However, XP requires continuous releases, and Scrum is all about timeboxing each release. Soo...they probably tried to get too much done in too little time, went over the limit, realized that what they had wasn't acceptable, broke the XP rules, made some hasty fixes, disabled some harder to fix features, and got it out the door late anyway. The only reason I know that is because I've been through that.
XP isn't a magical cookie cutter solution you can just apply and expect instant $$, you pretty much have to build your team around it from the ground up, have experienced XP people around, etc. In fact, it really only works if the top level management really buys into it.
That's nice and very positive, but I know I'd definitely not want to give up my freedom to criticize a company or product openly, for fear of legal reprimand. "Here, have this right to the freedom of speech, until your internet service provider catches wind of you complaining about bad service and interprets it as a disparaging attack on their company/product." I'd love to see companies use this sort of tool to improve their services/products as a form of feedback. However, that costs the company money/time that they can otherwise obtain more freely through legal recourse. As far as using it as a search, it also sounds like the perfect blogspamming tool.
If it makes it out to the market, there's a pretty good chance of PalmOS with the MontaVista kernel doing what MacOS X did for desktop/laptop computing awhile back. In fact, it may even push Linux further into the consumer market, despite Palm releasing their WinMob Treo. Devices running PalmOS are often cheaper than devices running WinMob...whereas it's usually the opposite with Macs vs. PCs. Anyway, I saw a demo of it (Palm/Linux) running on a phone during the last Palmsource, cool stuff.
I like the idea being able to hit a website from my handheld, knowing beforehand that it'll render decently. Instead of wasting my time/battery/in some cases data minutes waiting for some website to NOT render properly, just so I can know in the future that it doesn't work and not go back there. Plus, the mobile browsers that do so hopefully wouldn't have to spend so much overhead clipping down pages to make them render better.
I just don't like it because like most modern IDEs, it tries to do a lot of rubbish behind the scenes that I just don't want it to do. All I want is to make some folders, drop some files in, and save that as a project file. No active working project directory nonsense, no saved user preferences hidden file that I always have to remove manually from CVS, none of that junk. I just want to click on a project file, and have my project opened. I don't need to see a tree view of all my classes and resources either. If I want to build or run tests through my IDE, I want to drop the path to the script file I've made to do that. Intellisense isn't really a good replacement for the API reference/object browser, which I still usually keep open while developing if I'm stuck using VS. I hate playing the .NET guessing game with the intellisense menus. I'm not a seasoned .NET developer as I work on several mobile native platforms (split between C, C++, Java, and C#).
I work on several different mobile platforms, switching APIs and build environments constantly, and the one IDE on Windows I've always found that does exactly what I want is UltraEdit-32.
The Thunderbird email database is basically in Eudora mbox format. It usually works, but I've had situations where it has problems. Basically, you have to locate your Thunderbird profile in your Documents and Settings/Application data/ ...Thunderbird/profilename whatever directory, find the account you want to import, then import the Inbox as Eudora mail.
If you have any more questions about Thunderbird, search the archives at MozillaZine.org. /. is probably not the best place to ask technical support questions.
You do realize, there's a free version of Trillian as well that does almost everything the Pro version does, right? The pro version adds video chat, Jabber, Rendezvous, and Novell Groupwise, and that's about it. I know I don't really have any use for those, (all my friends seem to have burned out on jabber), and most of us geeks would rather not use video chat. Especially after 10 hours of coding, 5 slices of cold pizza, and some mountain dew. I know I don't want my girlfriend seeing me like that. :(
Probably shouldn't be replying to so many offtopics, but I'd suggest staying one step ahead of what the overwhelming majority of the crowd overseas is doing. I've done that over the years by going from contract to contract specializing in whatever platform is just starting to get big (in my case, I develop mostly for mobile devices, but there are a lot of jobs out there for other platforms, especially various embedded sys or point of sale systems dev that haven't jumped into the outsourcing ring for various reasons yet). Most of those developers overseas have a simple strategy, get proficient with the most popular language around, and jobs will come to you because you're cheap. The only way we're going to be able to find consistent work is to stay on the cutting edge, get somewhat specialized, and be flexible towards moving around and taking short term contracts here and there. Being a salesman is one thing, but if you really want to code, and your heart is set in spending some crazy hours doing so, then that's the only way I can see that someone can keep employed relatively consistently. (At least, that's how I've done it over my several year career. Getting a degree in Software Engineering probably helped me more than a CS degree as well, in retrospect, but obviously there's not much you can do about that now.) Also, as a last note, get really good at tech and interpersonal communications writing. My tech writing skills have extended several of my contracts over the years, the payback for me has been pretty respectable. Writing good, informative emails has helped make managers more inclined to keep me around as well.