I took the Stanford database course and it filled in a lot of blanks for me. I'd never had any formal training in databases but have picked up bits and pieces as I figured out how to do stuff (or asked my brilliant wife how to do something.)
Having a schedule and a grade at the end forced me to do it (once i put it on my development plan at work.) And I'm sure work liked it being free.
It was definitely more productive for me than if I'd gone and taken the typical corporate 2-day training class.
1. Carry your laptop under the passenger side floor mat. 2. Most hatchback and SUV vehicles with an open cargo area have a carpeted cargo area. Get some plywood and wood blocks, and build a little platform to lift the carpet. Maybe as much as 6 - 8 inches even. Hide your stuff under there. Unless they look carefully it'll look "normal." 3. Hide stuff under a pile of old water and soda bottles. Make sure the pile is "deep" enough that you can't see the stuff at the bottom. 4. As many others have said, take your valuables with you. 5. Move somewhere this stuff doesn't happen. Crime rates vary considerably. Where I live, UPS leaves packages on the porch and they stay there, unmolested, all day. I've left my back door unlocked, and sometimes slightly open, for days at a time. And I leave my car unlocked, and sometimes running, when I stop at the dry cleaner. (If it's actively snowing, you want to leave the defroster and wipers going if you don't want to have to clean the windows.)
Some people have 1 year of experience, twenty times.
I read this somewhere, no idea where. You get the point, though.
Personally, I'm 43, have been at my current employer for almost 10 years, and expect to stay forever at this point. I work with guys who have been there 30 years or more, and have done a ton of different things. People want me to move into management, but I've been resisting.
I have a wife, a step-son, a nephew who takes a lot of my time, and a baby on the way. I seldom work more than the defined hours. But I always get my work done, on time, and of good quality.
I'm the guy who knows just enough about how everything works that people come and ask me everything. I can usually answer.
I think of problems before they're problems, and that way, we avoid them.
These things are much more valuable than working 50 hours a week. (Especially since I probably get the same amount of work done in my 37.5.)
Also in Chicago area suburbs. This is not my experience - but I've lived in fairly tidy, expensive suburbs. (Darien, Downers Grove.)
We do have public parks with trash cans, and they aren't filled with household garbage.
I pay around $100 every quarter for a large (55 gallon?) blue trash can with wheels. They will take away anything I can fit in it.
If I have more garbage, I have to put a sticker on each piece. Each sticker costs around $2. They will even take away an old appliance for a $2 sticker. (But a junker usually gets it first. Put the appliance out without a sticker the night before and it'll be gone before morning and you save $2.)
Landscape waste, per trash can or per big brown bag, is $2.50.
You buy stickers at the grocery store or local governmental offices.
Recycling is free.
For our household there's no economic incentive to recycle, because 2 - 3x as much garbage as we generate, including recyclables, would fit in the big blue can.
Here too. I was working off an old recycling document and dutifully sorting until I saw the recycling truck come around - everything went in.
I now sort paper v. non-paper because wet paper is nasty, and it tends to get wet off the other stuff.
In our last house I didn't recycle, because we truly didn't have anywhere good to put recycle bins. In this house we do, and I recycle everything I can. We usually have a larger volume of recycling than of garbage.
So far as composting, I put everything I can down the garbage disposal and assume the sewer sludge is dealt with in an appropriate fashion. If composting were dealt with as a separate can to put food scraps in, that would be fine. If I'm expected to have a compost pile out back, I don't think I'm interested.
For example, if a credit processing system uses Dropbox for certain types of storage, but no cardholder data is contained in that storage, and there is no way for Dropbox to be used to compromise the non-Dropbox parts of the system, then Dropbox can be used now in a PCI compliant solution.
On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely, no matter how good the security and audit-ability of Dropbox, that a solution that involves storing cardholder data in Dropbox could ever be PCI compliant.
You can stay away from it if you like, but the positions I'm involved with interviewing for are development/maintenance/support of a code base of some 2.5 million lines of code that has been under fairly continuous development since the mid-1980's.
Trust me, you need to understand what the static keyword means to work on our code base.
I am only tangentially involved with the compliance matters where I work, but it is my general impression that it is not possible for a vendor to say they are PCI-DSS compliant.
They can be part of a PCI-DSS compliant solution but only the entire architecture/solution can be compliant.
I was involved with the design and implementation of our current credit/debit processing solution, and as I recall the primary software vendor was very clear that they were not saying that they were or were not PCI compliant, but merely that it was possible to create a PCI compliant solution involving their product.
I've been more on the interviewer side of the desk lately, and you should try to understand what it's like.
A lot of the applicants are, in fact, liars. Hideous liars. HR can't tell, so we get stuck talking to them.
Some of them claim years of experience. For some of them it is an outright lie. For others, it is multiple iterations of one year of experience.
Supposedly experienced C programmers don't understand the "static" keyword or what an asterisk does except for multiplication.
But I don't mess about with silly puzzles. I just apologize for having to ask them what should be simple questions, and then I ask maybe a half dozen to a dozen simple C-language questions. (Those were two of them.)
If they laugh and get the first three or four without even thinking then I stop. If it's a phone interview and it sounds like they're reading something to me that they don't understand, I look for more explanation.
Personally I suck at brain-teasers. I can program circles around most people, but I can't figure out those damn logical "Fred knows George and George hates Bob and Bob likes pizza. Does Fred like pizza?" questions. So I don't do it to others.
I have to admit to a soft spot for Newt. I don't think he'd be a particularly good president, but he seems like he might be an interesting person to spend the day with.
Right now, I'm liking Gary Johnson, primarily because he is that rare thing in politics - an honest man. He tells you what he thinks, and he won't lie about it to get your vote.
I happen to agree with what he thinks, but even if I didn't, I still might support him.
C/Unix development/support role. I have had multiple supposedly experienced people fail to answer these questions.
1. What does static do when applied to a variable within function scope? 2. What does static do when applied to a variable not within a function? 3. Aside from multiplication, what does "*" do? 4. How do you list the files in a directory? 5. Tell me a few kinds of inter-process communication.
Well really the worst thing that happens is eBay cancels the dead father's account, or it gets bad feedback. I'm hoping it wouldn't still be in use, so who cares?
So far as Facebook, my uncle died fairly recently, and his fiance kept posting as him for months. It was pretty creepy.
Well, the executor has to contact them. Assuming that's him, then this is true.
A dead man can't enter into contracts, so don't worry about the current eBay auctions. As they close, he should just send an email to the winner that his father has died and he is unable to honor the sale. If he likes, could offer to contact them to see if they'd still like to purchase the item once able to do so.
People with claims for refunds cannot be paid until the estate is up and running, and they will have to provide sufficient proof to be paid. An executor can't just hand out money to everyone who asks for it.
Glad to see someone finally brought these legal matters up.
I would just add that most companies will cheerfully refund as appropriate, and that should include overpayments. When my dad died, the magazines he had subscriptions to even gave refunds for the remaining issues.
I think people are thinking too hard about this, too. I haven't told people my passwords, or where to find them, but I keep meaning to. When I get around to doing something, i'll put a piece of paper in a cheap fire safe that has a password on it, which in turn unlocks the "password safe" program on my laptop. It will also have the login password for my laptop, which is only there to keep my stepson from using it. I never change it.
If I were feeling insecure about my wife, I'd mail a key to my sister, who lives a couple hours away, and hide the other one around the house somewhere for my use. That way wife and sister will have to cooperate to get access, which keeps either from snooping through my stuff while I'm still alive.
My philosophy is that I'm not paid what still seems like a somewhat shocking amount of money to just do what I'm told. You can get some kid to do that.
I'm paid to do my best to understand all the issues, make a clear recommendation, and to make sure that the boss clearly understands my recommendation. If the boss disagrees with my recommendation, it's my job to make sure they understand why I think what I think.
At that point it's on them if they want to decide against my recommendation. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. And it becomes my job to do what they decided should be done, and to do my best to make it work, even if I think it's stupid.
It seems to me that the OP is still in the "make sure they understand" phase.
We might tape a cardboard cutout to a window or something.
But I'll probably walk two or three miles with my nephew trick-or-treating, and then my wife will probably do another mile with him. We have 3 boxes of full-sized candy bars to hand out.
Last year he had so much candy I had to help carry it.
Ron Paul has a lot of interesting things to say, but very few of them make me want him as my president.
Instead, I like Gary Johnson. Fiscally conservative libertarian, but socially quite liberal. He wants both a balanced budget - and promises to submit one in 2013 - and the legalization of online gambling and marijuana.
Former 2-term New Mexico governor, term-limited out of office. Grew a construction company from a 1-man handyman company to the largest construction company in NM. Climbed Mount Everest. Rode his bicycle across New Hampshire as part of his campaigning there.
He's been largely excluded from polls and debates. (If you saw the Florida Republican debate in September, he had the joke about shovel-ready jobs.)
Police districts don't necessarily match up to city districts. It allows the police to divide things up in ways that make sense for law enforcement without getting so much into the politics of general districts.
We actually have something very much like this on the systems we deploy at work.
The boot menu has a "don't do this unless support tells you to" option.
If the user selects that option, it boots WinPE off a different partition. That Windows session puts up a message box for confirmation, then uses imagex to explode multiple WIM files out to the normal live partitions.
The way we load the boxes initially actually just adds one more step to this. Boot WinPE off DVD, partition the hard drive, copy the recovery partition's contents from DVD to hard drive, mark the "don't do this" boot menu as the default, and reboot. It then picks up with the WinPE off the hard drive recovery partition, which in turn loads the normal partitions. It works pretty well.
The connector on the camera appears likely to be for the flash bar, a 10-use flash. So I suspect it had 11 connectors, since that seems like the design that would minimize the manufacturing cost of the disposable component.
But I don't see anything special, it just looks like your typical connector made out of the edge of a circuit board. I suppose the general shape of the connector is similar to that of the iWhatever connector, but hardly unique or inspirational.
That said, it was a very popular, very well designed camera. And clean design was certainly of interest to Mr. Jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
I took the Stanford database course and it filled in a lot of blanks for me. I'd never had any formal training in databases but have picked up bits and pieces as I figured out how to do stuff (or asked my brilliant wife how to do something.)
Having a schedule and a grade at the end forced me to do it (once i put it on my development plan at work.) And I'm sure work liked it being free.
It was definitely more productive for me than if I'd gone and taken the typical corporate 2-day training class.
Apparently it's all the rage to go into K-Mart and pay off someone's layaway. (See multiple news stories.)
It sounds like the layaway department people are willing to find you someone who meets your profile.
Toys for young children and an account that is behind on payments is reportedly a popular profile.
The trick is apparently to pay it down so only a little is left due - if you pay it off, someone has to take the stuff.
1. Carry your laptop under the passenger side floor mat.
2. Most hatchback and SUV vehicles with an open cargo area have a carpeted cargo area. Get some plywood and wood blocks, and build a little platform to lift the carpet. Maybe as much as 6 - 8 inches even. Hide your stuff under there. Unless they look carefully it'll look "normal."
3. Hide stuff under a pile of old water and soda bottles. Make sure the pile is "deep" enough that you can't see the stuff at the bottom.
4. As many others have said, take your valuables with you.
5. Move somewhere this stuff doesn't happen. Crime rates vary considerably. Where I live, UPS leaves packages on the porch and they stay there, unmolested, all day. I've left my back door unlocked, and sometimes slightly open, for days at a time. And I leave my car unlocked, and sometimes running, when I stop at the dry cleaner. (If it's actively snowing, you want to leave the defroster and wipers going if you don't want to have to clean the windows.)
History.
Computers originally came into companies to do accounting and related work.
Some people have twenty years of experience.
Some people have 1 year of experience, twenty times.
I read this somewhere, no idea where. You get the point, though.
Personally, I'm 43, have been at my current employer for almost 10 years, and expect to stay forever at this point. I work with guys who have been there 30 years or more, and have done a ton of different things. People want me to move into management, but I've been resisting.
I have a wife, a step-son, a nephew who takes a lot of my time, and a baby on the way. I seldom work more than the defined hours. But I always get my work done, on time, and of good quality.
I'm the guy who knows just enough about how everything works that people come and ask me everything. I can usually answer.
I think of problems before they're problems, and that way, we avoid them.
These things are much more valuable than working 50 hours a week. (Especially since I probably get the same amount of work done in my 37.5.)
Also in Chicago area suburbs. This is not my experience - but I've lived in fairly tidy, expensive suburbs. (Darien, Downers Grove.)
We do have public parks with trash cans, and they aren't filled with household garbage.
I pay around $100 every quarter for a large (55 gallon?) blue trash can with wheels. They will take away anything I can fit in it.
If I have more garbage, I have to put a sticker on each piece. Each sticker costs around $2. They will even take away an old appliance for a $2 sticker. (But a junker usually gets it first. Put the appliance out without a sticker the night before and it'll be gone before morning and you save $2.)
Landscape waste, per trash can or per big brown bag, is $2.50.
You buy stickers at the grocery store or local governmental offices.
Recycling is free.
For our household there's no economic incentive to recycle, because 2 - 3x as much garbage as we generate, including recyclables, would fit in the big blue can.
Here too. I was working off an old recycling document and dutifully sorting until I saw the recycling truck come around - everything went in.
I now sort paper v. non-paper because wet paper is nasty, and it tends to get wet off the other stuff.
In our last house I didn't recycle, because we truly didn't have anywhere good to put recycle bins. In this house we do, and I recycle everything I can. We usually have a larger volume of recycling than of garbage.
So far as composting, I put everything I can down the garbage disposal and assume the sewer sludge is dealt with in an appropriate fashion. If composting were dealt with as a separate can to put food scraps in, that would be fine. If I'm expected to have a compost pile out back, I don't think I'm interested.
It's really the architecture.
For example, if a credit processing system uses Dropbox for certain types of storage, but no cardholder data is contained in that storage, and there is no way for Dropbox to be used to compromise the non-Dropbox parts of the system, then Dropbox can be used now in a PCI compliant solution.
On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely, no matter how good the security and audit-ability of Dropbox, that a solution that involves storing cardholder data in Dropbox could ever be PCI compliant.
You can stay away from it if you like, but the positions I'm involved with interviewing for are development/maintenance/support of a code base of some 2.5 million lines of code that has been under fairly continuous development since the mid-1980's.
Trust me, you need to understand what the static keyword means to work on our code base.
I am only tangentially involved with the compliance matters where I work, but it is my general impression that it is not possible for a vendor to say they are PCI-DSS compliant.
They can be part of a PCI-DSS compliant solution but only the entire architecture/solution can be compliant.
I was involved with the design and implementation of our current credit/debit processing solution, and as I recall the primary software vendor was very clear that they were not saying that they were or were not PCI compliant, but merely that it was possible to create a PCI compliant solution involving their product.
Probably.
But if you'd like to give him a chance, please harass CNBC about including him in their upcoming debate.
It makes the scope of the "global" variable local to the file.
I thought everyone knew that. But then, our code is full of freaking global variables. (It was originally written for 286 Xenix.)
I've been more on the interviewer side of the desk lately, and you should try to understand what it's like.
A lot of the applicants are, in fact, liars. Hideous liars. HR can't tell, so we get stuck talking to them.
Some of them claim years of experience. For some of them it is an outright lie. For others, it is multiple iterations of one year of experience.
Supposedly experienced C programmers don't understand the "static" keyword or what an asterisk does except for multiplication.
But I don't mess about with silly puzzles. I just apologize for having to ask them what should be simple questions, and then I ask maybe a half dozen to a dozen simple C-language questions. (Those were two of them.)
If they laugh and get the first three or four without even thinking then I stop. If it's a phone interview and it sounds like they're reading something to me that they don't understand, I look for more explanation.
Personally I suck at brain-teasers. I can program circles around most people, but I can't figure out those damn logical "Fred knows George and George hates Bob and Bob likes pizza. Does Fred like pizza?" questions. So I don't do it to others.
I have to admit to a soft spot for Newt. I don't think he'd be a particularly good president, but he seems like he might be an interesting person to spend the day with.
Right now, I'm liking Gary Johnson, primarily because he is that rare thing in politics - an honest man. He tells you what he thinks, and he won't lie about it to get your vote.
I happen to agree with what he thinks, but even if I didn't, I still might support him.
C/Unix development/support role. I have had multiple supposedly experienced people fail to answer these questions.
1. What does static do when applied to a variable within function scope?
2. What does static do when applied to a variable not within a function?
3. Aside from multiplication, what does "*" do?
4. How do you list the files in a directory?
5. Tell me a few kinds of inter-process communication.
Well really the worst thing that happens is eBay cancels the dead father's account, or it gets bad feedback. I'm hoping it wouldn't still be in use, so who cares?
So far as Facebook, my uncle died fairly recently, and his fiance kept posting as him for months. It was pretty creepy.
Well, the executor has to contact them. Assuming that's him, then this is true.
A dead man can't enter into contracts, so don't worry about the current eBay auctions. As they close, he should just send an email to the winner that his father has died and he is unable to honor the sale. If he likes, could offer to contact them to see if they'd still like to purchase the item once able to do so.
People with claims for refunds cannot be paid until the estate is up and running, and they will have to provide sufficient proof to be paid. An executor can't just hand out money to everyone who asks for it.
Glad to see someone finally brought these legal matters up.
I would just add that most companies will cheerfully refund as appropriate, and that should include overpayments. When my dad died, the magazines he had subscriptions to even gave refunds for the remaining issues.
I think people are thinking too hard about this, too. I haven't told people my passwords, or where to find them, but I keep meaning to. When I get around to doing something, i'll put a piece of paper in a cheap fire safe that has a password on it, which in turn unlocks the "password safe" program on my laptop. It will also have the login password for my laptop, which is only there to keep my stepson from using it. I never change it.
If I were feeling insecure about my wife, I'd mail a key to my sister, who lives a couple hours away, and hide the other one around the house somewhere for my use. That way wife and sister will have to cooperate to get access, which keeps either from snooping through my stuff while I'm still alive.
My philosophy is that I'm not paid what still seems like a somewhat shocking amount of money to just do what I'm told. You can get some kid to do that.
I'm paid to do my best to understand all the issues, make a clear recommendation, and to make sure that the boss clearly understands my recommendation. If the boss disagrees with my recommendation, it's my job to make sure they understand why I think what I think.
At that point it's on them if they want to decide against my recommendation. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. And it becomes my job to do what they decided should be done, and to do my best to make it work, even if I think it's stupid.
It seems to me that the OP is still in the "make sure they understand" phase.
I have asked the following questions of supposedly experienced C/Unix programmers and gotten no sensible answer:
Tell me what * (star, or asterisk) does in C. (Answer: multiplication.) OK, well, what other than multiplication?
Tell me what the static keyword means inside a function. Global to a file?
Tell me about some types of interprocess communications.
I dream of recursion being a filter.
We might tape a cardboard cutout to a window or something.
But I'll probably walk two or three miles with my nephew trick-or-treating, and then my wife will probably do another mile with him. We have 3 boxes of full-sized candy bars to hand out.
Last year he had so much candy I had to help carry it.
Ron Paul has a lot of interesting things to say, but very few of them make me want him as my president.
Instead, I like Gary Johnson. Fiscally conservative libertarian, but socially quite liberal. He wants both a balanced budget - and promises to submit one in 2013 - and the legalization of online gambling and marijuana.
Former 2-term New Mexico governor, term-limited out of office. Grew a construction company from a 1-man handyman company to the largest construction company in NM. Climbed Mount Everest. Rode his bicycle across New Hampshire as part of his campaigning there.
He's been largely excluded from polls and debates. (If you saw the Florida Republican debate in September, he had the joke about shovel-ready jobs.)
http://www.garyjohnson2012.com/
Well, based on looking at the VPD web site, I would guess that it's Patrol District 4.
http://vancouver.ca/police/organization/operations/patrol-districts/district-four/index.html
Police districts don't necessarily match up to city districts. It allows the police to divide things up in ways that make sense for law enforcement without getting so much into the politics of general districts.
We actually have something very much like this on the systems we deploy at work.
The boot menu has a "don't do this unless support tells you to" option.
If the user selects that option, it boots WinPE off a different partition. That Windows session puts up a message box for confirmation, then uses imagex to explode multiple WIM files out to the normal live partitions.
The way we load the boxes initially actually just adds one more step to this. Boot WinPE off DVD, partition the hard drive, copy the recovery partition's contents from DVD to hard drive, mark the "don't do this" boot menu as the default, and reboot. It then picks up with the WinPE off the hard drive recovery partition, which in turn loads the normal partitions. It works pretty well.
The connector on the camera appears likely to be for the flash bar, a 10-use flash. So I suspect it had 11 connectors, since that seems like the design that would minimize the manufacturing cost of the disposable component.
But I don't see anything special, it just looks like your typical connector made out of the edge of a circuit board. I suppose the general shape of the connector is similar to that of the iWhatever connector, but hardly unique or inspirational.
That said, it was a very popular, very well designed camera. And clean design was certainly of interest to Mr. Jobs.