There is a HUGE crane in Jacksonville FL, that, if memory serves me, was erected because someone was planning in building portable floating nuclear reactors. Things fell through as nuclear fell out of favor, but who knows, this plan may also come back full circle.
I have the same thing. I just upgraded from 8 120 gig to 8 250 gig drives, all in raid5. I use the system as my snapshot host with rsnapshot. I'd recomend going with SATA since that is hot swapable.
The broadband piece may be because most people don't just use it for work, but for their own use as well, and there is no reason work should pay for that.
Having an on-call pager or cell phone is not an unreasonable way to go. I have used worked that out with my staffs in the past and it works pretty well. If you aren't on-call you never get the call because some manager HAS to use the printer right outside his/her cube, and not the one 10 feet further down the hall.
Ride it out, but make it clear (if this is really the case) that you don't have room in your personal budget for high speed internet access, and that if you get the call it will take you X minutes to get into work.
Personally I don't take work calls on my personal cell (sometimes my wife takes it, or my kids) so it's not a reliable way to contact me. I do have a company provided pager.
The buttons control all sorts of aspects of the car. Brake bias, sway bar settings, fuel mixture and horsepower, pit speed rev limiter, etc.
Now the really AMAZING part is that if you watch the races, you can usually see Schumacher fiddling with these settings during a race and often in a turn or at well over 100 MPH.
I race myself in an open wheel car, and I do OK, but my concentration is usually at close to 100% all of the time, so seeing Schumi adjusting things in a turn just blows me away every time.
It really depends on the application. Typically I look for a package first, and if that isn't available I'll get the source and compile. However, having said that, you do need to think long term. Suppose you are the type that likes to upgrade as soon as new releases come out. Source will be your best bet. Another thing to consider is how easy is it to upgrade an app installed as a package with source? As an example, Nagios on SuSE 9 uses locations that make sense for its files, but it's pretty difficult to massage the configure command line to recreate that if you want to upgrade with source later on. Source code also seems to get you more involved with the app so you might have a better understanding of how things work once you have things installed (YMMV).
Under the willing suspention of disbelief catagory...
To me, the sounds in some cases, seemed like plausible sounds of wht you might here within the ship when firing, for example. Whie sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum, expeled fuel may make a sound when you pass through it and your ship colides with it, etc.
OK, lots of shots had external camera shots of ships, so it doesn't all jive 100%. This is TV afterall.
So... How long until someone writes a virus and adds it to the back if thier Drivers License?
I figure most of these swipers are already running some version of Windows, so I doubt it would be really difficult for someone to do this.
Not that I'm advocating it or anything. Just a thought.
Come to think of it, whats to prevent you from changing the DOB on the stripe as well! This may make it easier to fake your way in when the swipers stop looking at the cards.
I'm pretty sure that if they could just swipe and get a green or red light most wouldn't look at all.
Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species. Links and pictures are available from the official Web site, linked above."
Oh goody! Pictures too!
Just try and imagine the conversation that took place when this reasearch was submitted.
As someone recently fired, I'm not going to give you any sympathy for still having a job after firing some of your friends.
Fair enough. It's just that lots of people never have to get rid of people, and fewer still have to get rid of people that are good people and hard workers, etc, etc... It sucks to be the manager some times, but it certainly sucks more being the one who looses his or her job.
I did leave there about a year later, but on my own terms.
But, I will give you props for giving that employee early notice. That was a good thing to do... And I'm glad his son is doing well!
No need for that. Any decent person ( i.e. non PHB ) would do the same. I'm glad his son is doing well too. A happy ending for a change!
It's no fun doing the firing either!
on
How Were You Fired?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was a manager for a large well known company that got hit ( like everyone else ) by the bursting bubble, and I had to lay off about 1/3 of my staff. The list was given to me, which I suppose is just as well since they were/are all good workers.
On that list was a personal friend that had been working at the University I attended years ago and that I had only recently sucessfully recruited out of his comfortable, safe and stable job. On top of that, his first child was going through a great deal of medical attention because he was born with heart defect that needed several operations to repair ( if it could be repaired at all ).
If you have never been on this end of the stick, I can tell you that it's no fun. I'm no PHB. I went to bat for my staff all of the time. I was a rather well known for picking what seemed to be loosing battles ( however, it turned out that they usually just had longer time horizons ). I was sick to my stomach for weeks and must have lost 10 pounds before it was all over.
At any rate, I broke one of the first rules they told me, which was DO NOT let any of these people know in advance. I called him as soon as I knew he was on the list, and asked him if he thought he could get his old job back. He was stunned, but he understood what I was doing and why.
Turns out he was able to get his old job back, but if I had waited a day or two longer that might not have been the case ( as it was about to be listed ). He was able to keep the signing bonus, and as a Laid Off Employee he was given a very generous severence package ( 6 months pay and vesting as I recall ).
Oh yes, his son came through with flying colors and is now just fine.
Well, because lots of folks don't have the $$ to drop on every quality proprietary application that they might like to. Quark may be really, really good, but at close to $1000 bucks, I have looking around for an alternative. I'm not sure where In Design gets priced at, but Free is probably less expensive.
I don't think anyone equates Free + Open Source with good all of the time, but Free = Affordable on any budget.
Open Source can mean lots if things, but if an app takes off it often means that someone with better programing skills than myself who may end up solving some of my problems beoire I can get around to it.
One of the companies I worked for was acquired by Cisco back in 1998 ( as I recall ) and once with Cisco I was involved with and worked on no less that 5 acquisitions. So I have had my hands in this pretty deep from both sided of the fence.
My advice is that once you are acquired, become a part of that new company. It will make your lives much easier. No one wants to hear "well, when we were so-and-so, we did it this way" over and over again. They may be interested in that if you have something really advantageous, but that will get wrung out pretty quickly.
I have seen acquisitions who fight things all of they way, and eventually they loose out big time vs. the once who say, OK, were part of this new company now. Besides not trying to keep the old identity, this includes such pain in the ass things such as procurement systems and procedures, and other boring things like that.
Now, the new company may want you to keep some things unique, so feel that out early, but when you do make sure you are talking to the right person or persons.
Knowing where you fit in is also a key item! Get your reporting structure down pat ASAP, and if at all possible, make sure you report as high up the chain as possible. Politics are pretty important when you come into a new company. If the current VP of software thought his group was more than up to the task of what the CEO bought you for, then you may be in for a rough ride if you report to that VP.
It's hard to comment more based on what little info I have. If you will be in the same building as the acquiring company you may get sucked into the day to day of what they do now and your "special forces' role could be diminished. Development groups can always seem to use another few hot shot coders when deadlines loom. On the other hand, if you are a remote site it may be hard to get resources, consideration, or even acknowledgment at times. The flip side of both is that if you are local you can attend the meetings, make your opinions hear, and network with the staff, and if you are remote you can be left alone to do what you do best.
A GREAT deal of what's going to happen depends on the acquiring company. If they have made other acquisitions you may want to see how those have come off.
Lots of things can happen.
Oh yes, be careful about talking in the hallways about your new Porsches and Ferraris etc. People who have been slaving at the acquiring company for years to make the mortgage payment really, really don't want to hear about your new yacht, bigger house, etc.
Chips have gotten faster. Ram is bigger faster and less expensive. Disk space is dirt cheap.
But the telecom industry is just crawling in comparison. I use the same phone line for dial up now as I did 10 years ago, and things like ISDN, DSL, and Cable Modems get you better performance, but nothing stellar. I don't think a T-1 has really changed in cost for a very long time.
Funny, when the bubble was expanding all the talk was about the bandwidth we were suppored to have access to, but it never made it to my house.
Tap everyone in the office for headhunter contacts and quietly get the word out that there is a whole group of X engineers who developed Y that want to move to another company.
Depending on what you do, there may be someone out there ready to hire the whole lot of you. While less likley that it was about 3 or 4 years ago it's still a possibility IF what you do as a group is in demand and IF you creating first rate work in that field.
Slashdot Mirror
I got mine for Chistmas, and it's nice, however I get really bad reception in my house.
They really NEED to get the capability to tune into internet radio as well, then all will be well.
Besides moral support, and you need a good group to even get that, when will Super Groups provide some additional functionality?
I'm OK with this to a point if we make all of the camera feeds publicly available. Could be kinda fun or useful in some cases.
Ring, Ring. Hey Bob! I'm stuck at 3rd and Poindexter. Look at the city cams and tell me where the accident is, then tell me how to steer around it.
If we can all see what the watchers can see, then they have nothing on us that we don't know about.
There is a HUGE crane in Jacksonville FL, that, if memory serves me, was erected because someone was planning in building portable floating nuclear reactors. Things fell through as nuclear fell out of favor, but who knows, this plan may also come back full circle.
I have the same thing. I just upgraded from 8 120 gig to 8 250 gig drives, all in raid5. I use the system as my snapshot host with rsnapshot. I'd recomend going with SATA since that is hot swapable.
The broadband piece may be because most people don't just use it for work, but for their own use as well, and there is no reason work should pay for that.
Having an on-call pager or cell phone is not an unreasonable way to go. I have used worked that out with my staffs in the past and it works pretty well. If you aren't on-call you never get the call because some manager HAS to use the printer right outside his/her cube, and not the one 10 feet further down the hall.
Ride it out, but make it clear (if this is really the case) that you don't have room in your personal budget for high speed internet access, and that if you get the call it will take you X minutes to get into work.
Personally I don't take work calls on my personal cell (sometimes my wife takes it, or my kids) so it's not a reliable way to contact me. I do have a company provided pager.
YMMV
The buttons control all sorts of aspects of the car. Brake bias, sway bar settings, fuel mixture and horsepower, pit speed rev limiter, etc.
Now the really AMAZING part is that if you watch the races, you can usually see Schumacher fiddling with these settings during a race and often in a turn or at well over 100 MPH.
I race myself in an open wheel car, and I do OK, but my concentration is usually at close to 100% all of the time, so seeing Schumi adjusting things in a turn just blows me away every time.
It really depends on the application. Typically I look for a package first, and if that isn't available I'll get the source and compile. However, having said that, you do need to think long term. Suppose you are the type that likes to upgrade as soon as new releases come out. Source will be your best bet. Another thing to consider is how easy is it to upgrade an app installed as a package with source? As an example, Nagios on SuSE 9 uses locations that make sense for its files, but it's pretty difficult to massage the configure command line to recreate that if you want to upgrade with source later on.
Source code also seems to get you more involved with the app so you might have a better understanding of how things work once you have things installed (YMMV).
Works for me, anyway.
.. tell us the names!
<reverb>$Evil_Laugh</reverb>
Under the willing suspention of disbelief catagory...
To me, the sounds in some cases, seemed like plausible sounds of wht you might here within the ship when firing, for example. Whie sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum, expeled fuel may make a sound when you pass through it and your ship colides with it, etc.
OK, lots of shots had external camera shots of ships, so it doesn't all jive 100%. This is TV afterall.
Coming Soon...
EZ Pass Gausian Envelopes! Pull the EZ Pass out when you get to the bridge, then tuck them safely away.
So... How long until someone writes a virus and adds it to the back if thier Drivers License?
I figure most of these swipers are already running some version of Windows, so I doubt it would be really difficult for someone to do this.
Not that I'm advocating it or anything. Just a thought.
Come to think of it, whats to prevent you from changing the DOB on the stripe as well! This may make it easier to fake your way in when the swipers stop looking at the cards.
I'm pretty sure that if they could just swipe and get a green or red light most wouldn't look at all.
Technology, it seems, can cut both ways.
Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species. Links and pictures are available from the official Web site, linked above."
Oh goody! Pictures too!
Just try and imagine the conversation that took place when this reasearch was submitted.
As someone recently fired, I'm not going to give you any sympathy for still having a job after firing some of your friends.
Fair enough. It's just that lots of people never have to get rid of people, and fewer still have to get rid of people that are good people and hard workers, etc, etc... It sucks to be the manager some times, but it certainly sucks more being the one who looses his or her job.
I did leave there about a year later, but on my own terms.
But, I will give you props for giving that employee early notice. That was a good thing to do... And I'm glad his son is doing well!
No need for that. Any decent person ( i.e. non PHB ) would do the same. I'm glad his son is doing well too. A happy ending for a change!
I was a manager for a large well known company that got hit ( like everyone else ) by the bursting bubble, and I had to lay off about 1/3 of my staff. The list was given to me, which I suppose is just as well since they were/are all good workers.
On that list was a personal friend that had been working at the University I attended years ago and that I had only recently sucessfully recruited out of his comfortable, safe and stable job. On top of that, his first child was going through a great deal of medical attention because he was born with heart defect that needed several operations to repair ( if it could be repaired at all ).
If you have never been on this end of the stick, I can tell you that it's no fun. I'm no PHB. I went to bat for my staff all of the time. I was a rather well known for picking what seemed to be loosing battles ( however, it turned out that they usually just had longer time horizons ). I was sick to my stomach for weeks and must have lost 10 pounds before it was all over.
At any rate, I broke one of the first rules they told me, which was DO NOT let any of these people know in advance. I called him as soon as I knew he was on the list, and asked him if he thought he could get his old job back. He was stunned, but he understood what I was doing and why.
Turns out he was able to get his old job back, but if I had waited a day or two longer that might not have been the case ( as it was about to be listed ). He was able to keep the signing bonus, and as a Laid Off Employee he was given a very generous severence package ( 6 months pay and vesting as I recall ).
Oh yes, his son came through with flying colors and is now just fine.
You forgot...
BE THEEEERE!!!
Well, because lots of folks don't have the $$ to drop on every quality proprietary application that they might like to. Quark may be really, really good, but at close to $1000 bucks, I have looking around for an alternative. I'm not sure where In Design gets priced at, but Free is probably less expensive.
I don't think anyone equates Free + Open Source with good all of the time, but Free = Affordable on any budget.
Open Source can mean lots if things, but if an app takes off it often means that someone with better programing skills than myself who may end up solving some of my problems beoire I can get around to it.
..even though On Line file sharing has dropped 15%, retail sales will probably show a similar, if not steeper decline.
Personally, I buy less since It's harder to sample.
One of the companies I worked for was acquired by Cisco back in 1998 ( as I recall ) and once with Cisco I was involved with and worked on no less that 5 acquisitions. So I have had my hands in this pretty deep from both sided of the fence.
My advice is that once you are acquired, become a part of that new company. It will make your lives much easier. No one wants to hear "well, when we were so-and-so, we did it this way" over and over again. They may be interested in that if you have something really advantageous, but that will get wrung out pretty quickly.
I have seen acquisitions who fight things all of they way, and eventually they loose out big time vs. the once who say, OK, were part of this new company now. Besides not trying to keep the old identity, this includes such pain in the ass things such as procurement systems and procedures, and other boring things like that.
Now, the new company may want you to keep some things unique, so feel that out early, but when you do make sure you are talking to the right person or persons.
Knowing where you fit in is also a key item! Get your reporting structure down pat ASAP, and if at all possible, make sure you report as high up the chain as possible. Politics are pretty important when you come into a new company. If the current VP of software thought his group was more than up to the task of what the CEO bought you for, then you may be in for a rough ride if you report to that VP.
It's hard to comment more based on what little info I have. If you will be in the same building as the acquiring company you may get sucked into the day to day of what they do now and your "special forces' role could be diminished. Development groups can always seem to use another few hot shot coders when deadlines loom. On the other hand, if you are a remote site it may be hard to get resources, consideration, or even acknowledgment at times. The flip side of both is that if you are local you can attend the meetings, make your opinions hear, and network with the staff, and if you are remote you can be left alone to do what you do best.
A GREAT deal of what's going to happen depends on the acquiring company. If they have made other acquisitions you may want to see how those have come off.
Lots of things can happen.
Oh yes, be careful about talking in the hallways about your new Porsches and Ferraris etc. People who have been slaving at the acquiring company for years to make the mortgage payment really, really don't want to hear about your new yacht, bigger house, etc.
Hope this helps some.
...perhaps they will name a submarine after Monica Lewinski!
Chips have gotten faster. Ram is bigger faster and less expensive. Disk space is dirt cheap.
But the telecom industry is just crawling in comparison. I use the same phone line for dial up now as I did 10 years ago, and things like ISDN, DSL, and Cable Modems get you better performance, but nothing stellar. I don't think a T-1 has really changed in cost for a very long time.
Funny, when the bubble was expanding all the talk was about the bandwidth we were suppored to have access to, but it never made it to my house.
Eschew Obfuscation
..we should forward all of our spam to the reps who voted agains the bill?
$40 at Barnes and Noble
$28 at Amazon
Tap everyone in the office for headhunter contacts and quietly get the word out that there is a whole group of X engineers who developed Y that want to move to another company.
Depending on what you do, there may be someone out there ready to hire the whole lot of you. While less likley that it was about 3 or 4 years ago it's still a possibility IF what you do as a group is in demand and IF you creating first rate work in that field.
Think I'll go pattent "Hello World!"
I always wanted to name a band "Special Guest" too.