Talk to the local polititions. the phone company is a monopoly in MN, but you can let them know you are dissatisfied. In fact if they miss an appointment because THEY are unable to find your house, then you should call the PUC (Public Utilities Commission, but name might be slightly different) ASAP and complain. You don't have power yourself, but they do, and you pay them.
Tellecommuting is becomeing more common. Residential phone service just went up a notch in importance to the local ecconomy, and the phone company is gonna have to learn to deal with it. When a storm goes through and I don't have service for a week while they put the lines back up, I can live with that. But downtime that isn't related to a storm is not acceptable. A backhoe can take out one line, but it can be fixed in hours.
Yeah, a lot of jerks in Minneapolis. Pavement as far as eye can see though, it only true because all the good places are below eye level. No, not underground, down by the river bank. Cross the stone arch bridge from downtown, (on foot), and go down the steps. They are a little hidden, but you suddenly find yourself in an area where the only signs of civialization are ruins from the late 1800s. (of course walk a few more steps on the dirt path an you can see a modern city again) One of my favorite places, and right downtown.
Yahoo groups have ads, and I no longer can view the archives in any graphical enabled browsers. I don't mind ads, I accept the nessicity of them to support a service I use, unless I pay for them directly.
In the case of Yahoo I've seen one too many ad selling something indecient. Sex might sell, but it is a turn off to many people as well. (Even people who like it otherwise, often don't want anyone to know they do)
Techie adds are okay, and there hasn't yet been a problem with/. ads. Consider this a friendly remindeder to keep the ads clean.
The courts have ruled that the police are there to provide a presence, and NOT to prevent any crime.
In one case there women were in a house when a man broke in and started raping two of them. The third managed to hide under the bed, and get to a phone and call 911. When the police arrived the man answered the door and said "Everything is alright". the police left. Now if you think about it, they can't search the house without a warrent (they had no way of knowing the man didn't have rights to the house), and to serach based on a call isn't right. Unfortunatly it means that the police can't do anything. In otherwords, damned if they do, damned if they don't.
In North America cell phone plans are per minute, all calls. In Eurpoe all calls are caller pays. (simplification on both sides of the pond, but close enough)
This is different. It is not better it is not worse, it is different. There are advantages to each system. Just because your system is different doesn't mean that it is better. Do not pick on the downsides to our system that you don't have because your system has downsides too. In fact, the downsides are mutially exclusive, that is you can't have the best of both worlds! You pick one system or the other (there are more than two possibal systems), and live with the down sides as well as the good.
Nearly every programing lanagage is turning compatable (or turning complete). There really isn't much more to say. If you can write the program, you can in any language.
The only exception I can think of is sql, and that was never intended to be a programing language. (although i've not kept up, it might be turning complete by now with extentions I'm not aware of)
Revolutionary devolpment has stagnated, but that is good. House devolpment has pretty much done the same thing, I know people who live in houses 150 years old, and they are contrstured much the same as modern houses. Sure a 2x4 has a standard size now, while it didn't then, but that is a minor evolutionary change, not a revolution. We no better than do write languages the way cobol was written, but the only revolution since cobol is OOA, and there is OO-cobol for those who want it. (there were other evolutions that cobol missed out on, and some would argue that OOA isn't not a revolution either.
I don't know, I told my laptop to use the least power possibal when I'm running on AC power. I specificly set the CPU speed to slowest when on battery to save power. I don't notice the difference in speed, and it is only a PII-266 (I think).
The problem with
monster SUVs are the people in urban/suburban areas who drive them and
don't need them).
I've heard this before, but I no longer belive it. What most suburbanites need is a big SUV, and several small cars. However despite how much gas a SUV uses, the car is still much more expensive than gas. Everyone I know with a SUV admits that they don't need it for 90% or more of their driving. However they do need it one in a while. You can't pull a boat (boating is big where I live, most city folks own a boat) with a small car. Ever try to get 4 adults in a vechical? SUV back seats are uncomfortable, but cars are much worse.
Sure it sounds good to say that most SUVs never go off road, but that isn't the whole picture. You can't get your boat out of the water without 4 wheel drive and a truck. Your car won't go through deep snow (though the amount of snow a suv will go through that a car won't is small) The 5% of the time that you need a SUV means you buy one to use the other 95% of the time.
buses
have an unfair advantage - since they aren't made to account for the ancillary costs they entail.
I agree. However despite the unfair advantage buses have, they cannot make them work! Why should I agree to a light rail, or any other system when they can't make buses work.
Get this planners: I don't like to drive to work every day. Sunny sunday afternoon drives are fun, but the same route to work every day is boring and a waste of my time. However last time I checked the bus would take 1.5 hours to get me to work, a bike 1 (and I get needed exercise, but not practical in winter), my car 1/2. Above that time loss, where I work the bus goes by 4 times a day. Miss the last bus and I'm stuck, and since I'm on flex time I often have to work late and cannot know ahead of time which days those are.
If you want me to support light rail or something, similear, make something with an unfair advantage work first. If you can't make buses (cheap in the short term) work today why bother with something more expensive.
Case in point: a local suburb to me is considering (or doing I'm not sure) checks to make sure that only residents ride their buses. Seems that so many rural people were driving into their city, and parking that they are losing money on the buses, even though the buses are FULL! Thats right, they can't make full buses work. Why should I trust them to make something new work?
Pay attention, he didn't have $900 in his paypal account. He had paypal linked to his savings account, and when he realized there was a problem he contacted his bank. His bank discovered someone trying to withdraw $900 from his savings account, after they had been told someone had fradulently obtained the number to his account)
I personally never kept more then a buck in my paypal account when I used them, and when I quit using them (no longer was using a service that accepted paypal) I took all money out. however the account was still linked to my checking account until I closed it, so someone who got in would have been able to withdraw all the money I had in my account.
J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye) hasn't written anything in years. He is living off his old book, which is a classis. Now in his case he probable wouldn't write again, but as a socity we need him to contribute which he is not doing. (I'm not sure what he is doing with his life, he might have a day job and contribute for all I know, the point is he doesn't have to contribute to socity, his book written years ago is still supporting him.)
is that after you're dead your
employer is getting nothing from you -- you've stopped working.
You mean that if I die today my empolyer will no longer be able to sell version 1.0 of our product (releasted last year), or 2.0 (to be released in may, and my work is done barring unknown bugs)? Amazing. I suppose that we can't really sell version 1.0 of the product either as a few engineers quit before then.
Sure if I worked an assembly line putting wheels on a car (or some such) they would get no benifit from me once those cars are sold. However I don't work that kind of job. They will use the code for fuel injection on that car for years to come. (with modifications, but I doupt they will throw it all away now that it is working)
The french (no reference, but I think it is true) had pwered flight for years before the wright brothers. The wright brothers however were able to maintain [semi]controlled flight for several hours, while the french made uncontrolled hops of up to 200 feet before crashing controllably.
Just an idea, I like the above. Then make 30 copies of everyone's paper, and hand them out. Have the student's grade each other's paper. (you should be able to come up with criteria, get them to grade for content) Then grade their comments, and use the comments to grade the paper, and then hand the comments back to the orginial paper's author.
If you have some brilliant students who like to play devils advocate, try to get them to do a devil's advocate "we should censer more" paper, finding all the good they can in the book. You only need one or two if well written. The shock value it provides might be the only way to get some students thinking. If nothing else exposing them to a different point of view is a good thing.
Ahh, but this isn't if the whole series was always e-book only, this is if one of the latter books in a very popular series was e-book only. Few parents would spend $100 for a e-book reader and $15 for a book (sounds like reasonable prices) when it is new, but if a book everyone expects is ebook only they would! Of course they would want some assureance that other books would be avaiable for their e-book reader, but that can be delt with.
Of course you have to be careful here. I would consider book-4 in ebook format based on how good 1-3 were, but considering how horribal book 4 was, I'm not even sure I'll bother reading book 5 in any format. (most people think book 4 was the best, but I hated it. YMMV)
Whoa there. While I agree that campaign finance reform would benifit one party or anouther, but it also destroys freespeach. Simply put, money is speach, and anytime you prevent someone from giving, you trample on their speach rights. Coperations cannot vote, but they do have more money to give. Polititions know that, they need money to get their money out, so they allow access to be bought with campaign contributions. However, that is all it buys, because enough voters watch the issues (if nothing else because the oponent does and has enough money to get the bad word out) that polititions cannot afford to go with the major donars all the time.
In short, campaign finance limits of any sort are unconstitutional.
On a large project you will have backend, middleware (sometimes several layers), and a front end. there is no reason these need to be the same language.
Remember the OSI model (which isn't always best). You should be able to take your top layer, running on Appletalk over token ring, you should be able to change it to IPX running on Hyperchannel without changing your application code at all.
You should be able to write your layers in several independanat parts, and change. Most programs are written in a language, but scripted in a different one. VB is a poor choice for time critical high speed data movement, but excellent for scripting a windows application (even if it is basic). Hand coded assembly is poor for user interfraes, but when you need fast code in little memory nothing beats it. (assuming good programers)
ps, brownie points if you know what hyperchannel is...
You don't start with language, you start with requirements.
If this is a one shot project that won't need much maintance, then use whatever the majority of your devolpers know best. C/C++ have a large number of experts now for low level embedded work. VB has a lot of experts in the graphical front end area. Pytohon/Perl for (unix) scripts. If you are hiring new programers those are your choices.
GUI frontends are tools. If you do'nt like the ones you can buy write your own. In C vi vs emacs wars have been going on for years with no winner. In the mean time MS has sold a lot of compilers that use their IDE. There are dozens more in the free/shareware area, not to mention some compercial compititors. However I always have to ask WHY whenever someone writes a requirement to use any particular one. I can see saying that you will use MS's compiler for instance, but to require their tools is a mistake. Let the programer use their own, with the warning that you only support the offical ones. Make sure though that you can bypass the IDE you chose.
If this is projet that you intend to support for years, then there are a lot of C++ experts, which is a good arguement for using it, since you will have to deal with turnover. OTOH, a good programer can learn any language quick enough, and there are a lot of C in a C++ wrapper programers.
As the others have said, 401k is a legal definition. (that is law 401, section k)
Still, a 37 year old ought to have more than 8 months of income in his 401k. I personally have that much at 27, but I have only been in it for a couple years. I know people who LOST $400,000 in their 401k last year (401k is often invested in stock), they are about 50. Now you can do some math, if someone who is 50 can lose 400,000 assuming compounding and intellegent savings, how much should be there. I'm not sure, but I would say at 37 less then $100,000 is plain stupid. If I had to I could make $100,000 strech out for 4 years.
Note, that tapping into a 401k for job loss savings is not a smart thing to do. The law is set up to make 401k a good retirement savings account, not a good emergency fund, You should have 3-6 months of emergency savings according to all the finincial advisors I've talked to.
Ahh, but there is a big reward. For that 50k/year he probably works little overtime, which means time with family (if so inclined) or other hobbies. I'm in a similear situation, I turned down a.com job (acually it wasn't offered, but I had decided to turn it down shortly into the interview) a few years back because I want a life. At 25 I would rather waterski behind a boat that can just barely pull me, then to own a nice boat that I don't have the time or energy to use. I'm only getting older, already my body complains about things that 5 years ago were no problem. I'm not every 30! Everyone I know who is old enough to know tells me that things really start going downhill much latter, and I have at least 10 good years left, and maybe 30. I'm also appear to be about average as as far as how far down I am already.
Now you can take your choice, high risk, big bucks, no life when you can enjoy it; or low risk, still excellent bucks (average pay is around $30k/year if I remember right, and that is US, add in the rest of the world and it goes down), and time to enjoy life.
And don't forget that part of risk is not making it. A lot of.com people took the high risk jobs, and didn't make the big bucks, now they are sitting on a pile of dept that assumed they would make the big bucks. Not a good situation to be in.
Take your pick. Me, I'd rather have my life with low risk, and a rewaed I'm like to get, than the life of others who took the risk, but didn't get the reward.
My best boss knew nothing about programing. That is what made him good. He knew that he couldn't make technical decisions so he didn't try to. Instead he ran the scheduals, interferiance with upper management, and drug requirements out of marketing.
The worst managers I've seen try to make technical decisions, and do the design. The design is the fun part, and by doing the design yourself you understand it, so management should NOT do it. Not only will management screw it up, but they will screw up everyone else too.
Don't try to code. If you want to write code, I know several open source projects that need your help. However if you know how to code, you are probably a poor manager. The people skills needed to be a good programer are not often found in good programers, and the act of learning how to program gives you too much knowlege, and will tempt you to get involved where you should keep your nose out of the works.
But, the people that design and position the steering wheels, pedals, shifters, turn signals, gauges and door handles in such a way that *anyone* can go from one car to another without *any* difficulty or re-education
The example I give is this: I once drove a friends car in the dark. I drove it on city streets for close to an hour before I realised the turn signal lever wasn't a lever, but a little switch on the dashborad. However that switch was right where my fingers expeced it to be, and worked just the like the turn signal lever of any other car I ever drove so I didn't know that it was a completely different implimentation!
Unfortunatly not all things are like that. When I drive my dad's truck I often trun the headlights off on a rainy day, his headlights switch is where the whindshield whipers on most cars are.
Thats the problem. Clippy is an excellent idea, if it is implimented correctly. Help that knows how to do what you want to do, and helps you do it. Something to notice that you are doing something the hardway and point out the easy way.
Insteady clippy is annoying. A failure of HCI, despite being a good idea. Not the first time though. Nobody would consider a talking car anymore, even though it could be useful to have your car talk. But fear of "a door is ajar" keep killing the idea before it starts.
I agree and disagree. that is I agree fully that if you give a starving man food, and he will be starving tommorow. (with the exception of those who are waiting for harvest to ripen...), while teach the starving man to farm and he will be fed for life. (assume physical ability) However someone who is starving doesn't give his body enough energy to learn. So you really need to attack both problems at once: i'll give you enough food to live for a year, but you have to learn to farm to get it. Then after a year he has a farm that will provide food for life.
I have no evidence to back it up, but I've been told and it makes sense: A starving body does not put as much energy into the brain, and thus cronic hunger may prevent some equiped to be smart from ever reach that level, even if later in life plenty of food is avaiable.
Start testing today, impiment tommorow. 2x4s with post-it notes for all yoru glyphs hand drawn and the like so your human factors experts can test need to be done now, and you need these foreign children in early. Don't impliment much (you can design your communications infrastructure, but beware that technology will march while you do other things) now, but don't waste your time one software or custom hardware until you have a design worth working with.
OTOH, make sure that the human factors guys give you enough time to work with, and you give the testers enough time to work with. The time line needs to be well done.
In order to make the time line possibal, first the a good hardware design that you can work with. Then once that is finialized (but not nessicarly bug free), work on software, but have the human factors people prioritiese, don't start all projects at once or this won't work, better to have half your features working then all the features, but none work.
And if your project managers didn't respond "I already knew all that and am doing it", quit now so your name isn't on a baddly run project that will fail.
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Talk to the local polititions. the phone company is a monopoly in MN, but you can let them know you are dissatisfied. In fact if they miss an appointment because THEY are unable to find your house, then you should call the PUC (Public Utilities Commission, but name might be slightly different) ASAP and complain. You don't have power yourself, but they do, and you pay them.
Tellecommuting is becomeing more common. Residential phone service just went up a notch in importance to the local ecconomy, and the phone company is gonna have to learn to deal with it. When a storm goes through and I don't have service for a week while they put the lines back up, I can live with that. But downtime that isn't related to a storm is not acceptable. A backhoe can take out one line, but it can be fixed in hours.
Yeah, a lot of jerks in Minneapolis. Pavement as far as eye can see though, it only true because all the good places are below eye level. No, not underground, down by the river bank. Cross the stone arch bridge from downtown, (on foot), and go down the steps. They are a little hidden, but you suddenly find yourself in an area where the only signs of civialization are ruins from the late 1800s. (of course walk a few more steps on the dirt path an you can see a modern city again) One of my favorite places, and right downtown.
Yahoo groups have ads, and I no longer can view the archives in any graphical enabled browsers. I don't mind ads, I accept the nessicity of them to support a service I use, unless I pay for them directly.
In the case of Yahoo I've seen one too many ad selling something indecient. Sex might sell, but it is a turn off to many people as well. (Even people who like it otherwise, often don't want anyone to know they do)
Techie adds are okay, and there hasn't yet been a problem with /. ads. Consider this a friendly remindeder to keep the ads clean.
The courts have ruled that the police are there to provide a presence, and NOT to prevent any crime.
In one case there women were in a house when a man broke in and started raping two of them. The third managed to hide under the bed, and get to a phone and call 911. When the police arrived the man answered the door and said "Everything is alright". the police left. Now if you think about it, they can't search the house without a warrent (they had no way of knowing the man didn't have rights to the house), and to serach based on a call isn't right. Unfortunatly it means that the police can't do anything. In otherwords, damned if they do, damned if they don't.
In North America cell phone plans are per minute, all calls. In Eurpoe all calls are caller pays. (simplification on both sides of the pond, but close enough)
This is different. It is not better it is not worse, it is different. There are advantages to each system. Just because your system is different doesn't mean that it is better. Do not pick on the downsides to our system that you don't have because your system has downsides too. In fact, the downsides are mutially exclusive, that is you can't have the best of both worlds! You pick one system or the other (there are more than two possibal systems), and live with the down sides as well as the good.
Nearly every programing lanagage is turning compatable (or turning complete). There really isn't much more to say. If you can write the program, you can in any language.
The only exception I can think of is sql, and that was never intended to be a programing language. (although i've not kept up, it might be turning complete by now with extentions I'm not aware of)
Revolutionary devolpment has stagnated, but that is good. House devolpment has pretty much done the same thing, I know people who live in houses 150 years old, and they are contrstured much the same as modern houses. Sure a 2x4 has a standard size now, while it didn't then, but that is a minor evolutionary change, not a revolution. We no better than do write languages the way cobol was written, but the only revolution since cobol is OOA, and there is OO-cobol for those who want it. (there were other evolutions that cobol missed out on, and some would argue that OOA isn't not a revolution either.
I don't know, I told my laptop to use the least power possibal when I'm running on AC power. I specificly set the CPU speed to slowest when on battery to save power. I don't notice the difference in speed, and it is only a PII-266 (I think).
The problem with monster SUVs are the people in urban/suburban areas who drive them and don't need them).
I've heard this before, but I no longer belive it. What most suburbanites need is a big SUV, and several small cars. However despite how much gas a SUV uses, the car is still much more expensive than gas. Everyone I know with a SUV admits that they don't need it for 90% or more of their driving. However they do need it one in a while. You can't pull a boat (boating is big where I live, most city folks own a boat) with a small car. Ever try to get 4 adults in a vechical? SUV back seats are uncomfortable, but cars are much worse.
Sure it sounds good to say that most SUVs never go off road, but that isn't the whole picture. You can't get your boat out of the water without 4 wheel drive and a truck. Your car won't go through deep snow (though the amount of snow a suv will go through that a car won't is small) The 5% of the time that you need a SUV means you buy one to use the other 95% of the time.
buses have an unfair advantage - since they aren't made to account for the ancillary costs they entail.
I agree. However despite the unfair advantage buses have, they cannot make them work! Why should I agree to a light rail, or any other system when they can't make buses work.
Get this planners: I don't like to drive to work every day. Sunny sunday afternoon drives are fun, but the same route to work every day is boring and a waste of my time. However last time I checked the bus would take 1.5 hours to get me to work, a bike 1 (and I get needed exercise, but not practical in winter), my car 1/2. Above that time loss, where I work the bus goes by 4 times a day. Miss the last bus and I'm stuck, and since I'm on flex time I often have to work late and cannot know ahead of time which days those are.
If you want me to support light rail or something, similear, make something with an unfair advantage work first. If you can't make buses (cheap in the short term) work today why bother with something more expensive.
Case in point: a local suburb to me is considering (or doing I'm not sure) checks to make sure that only residents ride their buses. Seems that so many rural people were driving into their city, and parking that they are losing money on the buses, even though the buses are FULL! Thats right, they can't make full buses work. Why should I trust them to make something new work?
Pay attention, he didn't have $900 in his paypal account. He had paypal linked to his savings account, and when he realized there was a problem he contacted his bank. His bank discovered someone trying to withdraw $900 from his savings account, after they had been told someone had fradulently obtained the number to his account)
I personally never kept more then a buck in my paypal account when I used them, and when I quit using them (no longer was using a service that accepted paypal) I took all money out. however the account was still linked to my checking account until I closed it, so someone who got in would have been able to withdraw all the money I had in my account.
J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye) hasn't written anything in years. He is living off his old book, which is a classis. Now in his case he probable wouldn't write again, but as a socity we need him to contribute which he is not doing. (I'm not sure what he is doing with his life, he might have a day job and contribute for all I know, the point is he doesn't have to contribute to socity, his book written years ago is still supporting him.)
is that after you're dead your employer is getting nothing from you -- you've stopped working.
You mean that if I die today my empolyer will no longer be able to sell version 1.0 of our product (releasted last year), or 2.0 (to be released in may, and my work is done barring unknown bugs)? Amazing. I suppose that we can't really sell version 1.0 of the product either as a few engineers quit before then.
Sure if I worked an assembly line putting wheels on a car (or some such) they would get no benifit from me once those cars are sold. However I don't work that kind of job. They will use the code for fuel injection on that car for years to come. (with modifications, but I doupt they will throw it all away now that it is working)
The french (no reference, but I think it is true) had pwered flight for years before the wright brothers. The wright brothers however were able to maintain [semi]controlled flight for several hours, while the french made uncontrolled hops of up to 200 feet before crashing controllably.
Just an idea, I like the above. Then make 30 copies of everyone's paper, and hand them out. Have the student's grade each other's paper. (you should be able to come up with criteria, get them to grade for content) Then grade their comments, and use the comments to grade the paper, and then hand the comments back to the orginial paper's author.
If you have some brilliant students who like to play devils advocate, try to get them to do a devil's advocate "we should censer more" paper, finding all the good they can in the book. You only need one or two if well written. The shock value it provides might be the only way to get some students thinking. If nothing else exposing them to a different point of view is a good thing.
Ahh, but this isn't if the whole series was always e-book only, this is if one of the latter books in a very popular series was e-book only. Few parents would spend $100 for a e-book reader and $15 for a book (sounds like reasonable prices) when it is new, but if a book everyone expects is ebook only they would! Of course they would want some assureance that other books would be avaiable for their e-book reader, but that can be delt with.
Of course you have to be careful here. I would consider book-4 in ebook format based on how good 1-3 were, but considering how horribal book 4 was, I'm not even sure I'll bother reading book 5 in any format. (most people think book 4 was the best, but I hated it. YMMV)
Whoa there. While I agree that campaign finance reform would benifit one party or anouther, but it also destroys freespeach. Simply put, money is speach, and anytime you prevent someone from giving, you trample on their speach rights. Coperations cannot vote, but they do have more money to give. Polititions know that, they need money to get their money out, so they allow access to be bought with campaign contributions. However, that is all it buys, because enough voters watch the issues (if nothing else because the oponent does and has enough money to get the bad word out) that polititions cannot afford to go with the major donars all the time.
In short, campaign finance limits of any sort are unconstitutional.
On a large project you will have backend, middleware (sometimes several layers), and a front end. there is no reason these need to be the same language.
Remember the OSI model (which isn't always best). You should be able to take your top layer, running on Appletalk over token ring, you should be able to change it to IPX running on Hyperchannel without changing your application code at all.
You should be able to write your layers in several independanat parts, and change. Most programs are written in a language, but scripted in a different one. VB is a poor choice for time critical high speed data movement, but excellent for scripting a windows application (even if it is basic). Hand coded assembly is poor for user interfraes, but when you need fast code in little memory nothing beats it. (assuming good programers)
ps, brownie points if you know what hyperchannel is...
You don't start with language, you start with requirements.
If this is a one shot project that won't need much maintance, then use whatever the majority of your devolpers know best. C/C++ have a large number of experts now for low level embedded work. VB has a lot of experts in the graphical front end area. Pytohon/Perl for (unix) scripts. If you are hiring new programers those are your choices.
GUI frontends are tools. If you do'nt like the ones you can buy write your own. In C vi vs emacs wars have been going on for years with no winner. In the mean time MS has sold a lot of compilers that use their IDE. There are dozens more in the free/shareware area, not to mention some compercial compititors. However I always have to ask WHY whenever someone writes a requirement to use any particular one. I can see saying that you will use MS's compiler for instance, but to require their tools is a mistake. Let the programer use their own, with the warning that you only support the offical ones. Make sure though that you can bypass the IDE you chose.
If this is projet that you intend to support for years, then there are a lot of C++ experts, which is a good arguement for using it, since you will have to deal with turnover. OTOH, a good programer can learn any language quick enough, and there are a lot of C in a C++ wrapper programers.
As the others have said, 401k is a legal definition. (that is law 401, section k)
Still, a 37 year old ought to have more than 8 months of income in his 401k. I personally have that much at 27, but I have only been in it for a couple years. I know people who LOST $400,000 in their 401k last year (401k is often invested in stock), they are about 50. Now you can do some math, if someone who is 50 can lose 400,000 assuming compounding and intellegent savings, how much should be there. I'm not sure, but I would say at 37 less then $100,000 is plain stupid. If I had to I could make $100,000 strech out for 4 years.
Note, that tapping into a 401k for job loss savings is not a smart thing to do. The law is set up to make 401k a good retirement savings account, not a good emergency fund, You should have 3-6 months of emergency savings according to all the finincial advisors I've talked to.
Ahh, but there is a big reward. For that 50k/year he probably works little overtime, which means time with family (if so inclined) or other hobbies. I'm in a similear situation, I turned down a .com job (acually it wasn't offered, but I had decided to turn it down shortly into the interview) a few years back because I want a life. At 25 I would rather waterski behind a boat that can just barely pull me, then to own a nice boat that I don't have the time or energy to use. I'm only getting older, already my body complains about things that 5 years ago were no problem. I'm not every 30! Everyone I know who is old enough to know tells me that things really start going downhill much latter, and I have at least 10 good years left, and maybe 30. I'm also appear to be about average as as far as how far down I am already.
Now you can take your choice, high risk, big bucks, no life when you can enjoy it; or low risk, still excellent bucks (average pay is around $30k/year if I remember right, and that is US, add in the rest of the world and it goes down), and time to enjoy life.
And don't forget that part of risk is not making it. A lot of .com people took the high risk jobs, and didn't make the big bucks, now they are sitting on a pile of dept that assumed they would make the big bucks. Not a good situation to be in.
Take your pick. Me, I'd rather have my life with low risk, and a rewaed I'm like to get, than the life of others who took the risk, but didn't get the reward.
My best boss knew nothing about programing. That is what made him good. He knew that he couldn't make technical decisions so he didn't try to. Instead he ran the scheduals, interferiance with upper management, and drug requirements out of marketing.
The worst managers I've seen try to make technical decisions, and do the design. The design is the fun part, and by doing the design yourself you understand it, so management should NOT do it. Not only will management screw it up, but they will screw up everyone else too.
Don't try to code. If you want to write code, I know several open source projects that need your help. However if you know how to code, you are probably a poor manager. The people skills needed to be a good programer are not often found in good programers, and the act of learning how to program gives you too much knowlege, and will tempt you to get involved where you should keep your nose out of the works.
But, the people that design and position the steering wheels, pedals, shifters, turn signals, gauges and door handles in such a way that *anyone* can go from one car to another without *any* difficulty or re-education
The example I give is this: I once drove a friends car in the dark. I drove it on city streets for close to an hour before I realised the turn signal lever wasn't a lever, but a little switch on the dashborad. However that switch was right where my fingers expeced it to be, and worked just the like the turn signal lever of any other car I ever drove so I didn't know that it was a completely different implimentation!
Unfortunatly not all things are like that. When I drive my dad's truck I often trun the headlights off on a rainy day, his headlights switch is where the whindshield whipers on most cars are.
Thats the problem. Clippy is an excellent idea, if it is implimented correctly. Help that knows how to do what you want to do, and helps you do it. Something to notice that you are doing something the hardway and point out the easy way.
Insteady clippy is annoying. A failure of HCI, despite being a good idea. Not the first time though. Nobody would consider a talking car anymore, even though it could be useful to have your car talk. But fear of "a door is ajar" keep killing the idea before it starts.
I agree and disagree. that is I agree fully that if you give a starving man food, and he will be starving tommorow. (with the exception of those who are waiting for harvest to ripen...), while teach the starving man to farm and he will be fed for life. (assume physical ability) However someone who is starving doesn't give his body enough energy to learn. So you really need to attack both problems at once: i'll give you enough food to live for a year, but you have to learn to farm to get it. Then after a year he has a farm that will provide food for life.
I have no evidence to back it up, but I've been told and it makes sense: A starving body does not put as much energy into the brain, and thus cronic hunger may prevent some equiped to be smart from ever reach that level, even if later in life plenty of food is avaiable.
Start testing today, impiment tommorow. 2x4s with post-it notes for all yoru glyphs hand drawn and the like so your human factors experts can test need to be done now, and you need these foreign children in early. Don't impliment much (you can design your communications infrastructure, but beware that technology will march while you do other things) now, but don't waste your time one software or custom hardware until you have a design worth working with.
OTOH, make sure that the human factors guys give you enough time to work with, and you give the testers enough time to work with. The time line needs to be well done.
In order to make the time line possibal, first the a good hardware design that you can work with. Then once that is finialized (but not nessicarly bug free), work on software, but have the human factors people prioritiese, don't start all projects at once or this won't work, better to have half your features working then all the features, but none work.
And if your project managers didn't respond "I already knew all that and am doing it", quit now so your name isn't on a baddly run project that will fail.