One downside of free WiFi is that there is no one to call when it stops working. I live in Mountain View, and when Google WiFi first came out it was good enough that I dropped my DSL. I was very happy with it for about a year, but then it got intermittent at my house, working well on some days and not at all on others. After a few more months it wouldn't work at all from early evening until after midnight, presumably because everyone else was also trying to use it at that time. After that I switched to Comcast - they are overpriced and a pain to deal with, but at least when I call to complain that my service has failed they manage to fix it eventually.
As a side note, it always worked well a few hundred feet from my house, so I assume that the back end was working OK.
HP profit sharing was 12% of pre-tax profits.
on
Christmas Bonuses?
·
· Score: 1
Back when Hewlett Packard was one of the greatest companies in the world they gave 12% of pre-tax profits as 'Profit Sharing.' Profit sharing was paid out twice per year. Almost everyone in the company was included. In good years each profit sharing check would be close to one months pay, in bad years they would be much smaller.
HP no longer gives the 12%. Agilent (a spin off
of HP) doesn't have any profit to share, and if they did they would give far less than 12% of pre-tax profits. They both have changed to formulas based on factors like return on assets and revenue growth, with an explicit goal of sharing less of the profit.
Profit sharing had the obvious motivational benefits, but it also made employees feel that they were part of a great company and not simply cogs in a machine. This was part of what made HP so successful.
You can debate whether HP was so successful that it could afford to give 12%, or was HP so successful because it gave 12%. My belief is that profit sharing was one of many things that made HP great. By itself it neither makes nor breaks the company, but it was one important factor in HP's former success.
I think jaredmauch hits the nail on the head when he says "You're not talking about your 'Average' ISP." AOL is very paternalistic, giving its customers a nice, safe, easy environment that you or I might find infuriating but that some people really like. Those people who want 'somebody who knows computers' to manage their 'online experience' are the same people who want 'someone who knows computers' to manage their PC.
I think AOL may be accidentally backing themselves into a good business model. You buy the PC and sign up for AOL, and they take care of all of the rest of the technical stuff for you. I won't be signing up anytime soon, but I bet a lot of people would love the service.
The Crash Recovery Kit for Linux is a bare bones Linux system with a lot of useful utils you might need for crash recovery. It is useful for both Linux and Windows. Following the directions in their how-to, I was able to boot a crashed system, get networking working, and copy a bunch of NTFS files I really did not want to lose to another PC. It can also do a lot more, see their how-to for details.
You are right, they do know how to handle hydrogen
industrially, and they can do it very well. The mechanics, plumbers, technicians etc who work with hydrogen are all very skilled and know all of the necessary tricks.
I am sure that if you were piping hydrogen from a big industrial facility to a big commercial power plant, with all of the infastructure that goes with big industrial chemical plants, it would be relatively safe and easy. The part I wonder about is sending it from small, decentralized generation facilities to small, decentralized fuel cells. With lots of small operations spread all over, it would be difficult to maintain the infrastructure and experience needed to handle hydrogen safely and efficiently.
Of course, I guess the same thing could have been said about electricity 100 years ago.
Actual hydrogen pipelines break and spill just like every other kind of pipeline ever built.
Which is why we don't use, say, oil pipelines.:)
Actually, hydrogen pipelines are the most leak-prone plumbing I have ever worked with.
H2 is a small molecule, it will slip through the tiniest imperfections in your plumbing.
I was working at lab scale, so we could be exceptionally careful and attentive to detail,
and we still had problems.
The same plumbing
techniques that worked perfectly with nitrogen or helium were barely
acceptable for hydrogen. Valves and other fittings had to
be in perfect condition or there was no chance that they would work. We could make it work, but it took a lot of effort
and a lot of testing and rework. This
was mainly with 1/4 and 1/2 inch diameter tubing, bigger lines are even harder to
get leak tight.
You might consider the aluminum structural framing used in a lot of custom industrial equipment. This is basically bolt-together aluminum channel. It is fairly easy to put together, makes a very nice rigid frame,
is easy to attach brackets to, can be cut with simple hand tools, and some brands look pretty good. A lot of small to mid-sized custom industrial equipment is in boxes built with these frames - often with rectangular
tubing forming the edges of a box and glass or PVC sheets forming the face of the box. Using stained glass
in place of the window glass or PVC seems a natural fit.
The problem would be that this stuff is priced for industrial users. To get an idea of what is available and what it costs look up structural framing at McMaster Carr. McMaster Carr is a full-priced industrial supply company, so nothing there is cheap, but this type of stuff is hard to get cheap. If you can find somebody who is buying this stuff in bulk they might be willing to sell you some
of their scrap pieces. The type of company that might have this stuff would be automation houses or
custom machine builders.
If you are in metal recycling plants, you probably have compressed air available. If the compressed air is relatively clean and oil free, you can do like a lot of industrial electronics cabinets do and feed compressed air into the cabinet. This cools the cabinet and also keeps the cabinet at positive pressure to keep other junk out.
The only place I have used this scheme is in a large factory with automatic hoists, large motors, and other noise sources. In that environment the noise is not noticeable, but in a home or office it might be intolerably loud.
The easiest way to do this is probably to leave the exhaust fans where they are now, leave all the existing inlets open, add a 1/4 inch tubing inlet with a valve to introduce the air, and slowly turn the valve up until the case pressure is just slightly positive with the exhaust fans running. (Measure the case pressure by finding an opening that is not near an exhaust fan and hold a piece of paper against the opening - when the paper starts to flutter you are just barely at positive pressure.)
To reduce the air used, and also reduce the noise, you can plug up all of the air inlets so that there is very little air
exiting except at the exhaust fans. The downside of this is that if the compressed air goes off the PC will overheat since there is not enough air coming in. In industrial settings we
usually had a pressure sensor and shut things down when the air pressure dropped for more than a minute or so, but this may not be appropriate for a PC.
If you wanted to get really extreme, you could water cool the cpu to an external heat exchanger, cooling the inside of the case in the process. Eliminate the exhaust fans, add in some circulating fans, plug most of the outlets, and set the air flow to keep the case pressure slightly positive. Of course, by the time you did all this you would essentially have an industrial PC and it would cost as much as an industrial PC.
One thing to watch out for if you do this, maintence people sometimes add oilers to airlines that previously had nice clean air (usually because they assume that the line is only being used to run pneumatic tools and they decide that it will be easier to maintain one big oiler on the supply line instead of lots of small oilers at each tool.) I can tell you from sad experience that if this happens you will have a thin film of oil on every surface inside the case and that it takes many hours to clean this up.
It doesn't surprise me that a few extremely successful people like Spielberg succeed brilliantly despite a less prestigious and possibly less rigorous education. What would surprise me is to find that the typical student applying to elite schools would not have a far more successful career after graduating from an elite school like Harvard than after graduating from a 'lesser' college like Cal State Long Beach.
To drastically oversimplify the situation, I have noticed that there are three broad groups of people in any almost every work or school situation:
Inherently Successful People: People who will succeed brilliantly no matter what obstacles they face. Most of us like to think of ourselves as members of this group, but few of us really are.
Ordinary People: People, often very smart, capable, and hard working, who given a few lucky breaks or good opportunities can capitalize on them to build a good career. These are the vast majority of the people I have known in school and at work.
Screw-Ups: Screw ups are unable to do a good job, no matter what opportunities they are given and no matter how many breaks they receive. Fortunately few people are inherently screw ups, but there are always a few of them in any large group.
An Ivy League or Stanford education, a rich well connected family, friends in high places, and all of the other traditional predictors of success are nice but unnecessary bonuses for the inherently sucessful, a huge help to the vast majority of ordinary people, and very little help to the screw-ups.
Why not just add a tax of 10 cents to every single phone call and reduce personal income taxes by the same amount ?
The actual amount might need to a bit of tweaking, I got 10 cents by assuming that telemarketers are successful on one in a thousand calls and that the average profit per sale is $100. Does anyone know real numbers ?
I guess I could do the same thing by getting my own 900 number, but that might be sort of difficult to implement unilaterally.
I used to have a job where I was never at my desk - I was either in meetings or on the production floor or working on a piece of equipment.... I would often have to find info, schedule meetings, call people,... when I was nowhere near my desk. I used an hp200LX (an ancient DOS based PDA) that was very good, then 'upgraded' to a Handspring when the powers that be demanded that I keep my calendar up to date in Outlook.
I used the PDA a lot in those days, both for work and for personal use. I had all of my social and weekend activities scheduled in, I had all of my friends and families contact information, birthdays,... entered in. I even had all of the recipes I like to cook programmed in (it is amazing how nice it is to be able to decide you want to cook something and just stop by the store to pick up the ingredients without having to go home and look up the recipe first.) I was completely addicted to the PDA and couldn't imagine how I had
survived without one. I was sure that even if I didn't need one for work I would continue
to use one.
I used the PDA almost daily for about 5 years, and then I changed jobs.
I do a lot more programming now, and spend a lot of time at my desk.
Meetings are either routine and planned long in advance or else impromptu
'are you available now ?' meetings. I slowly started to use the
PDA less and less. It is now sitting in a drawer at home and hasn't been used in over a
year. It turns out that my old job's requirement that I be able to schedule meetings at any time and keep my Outlook calendar up to date was in effect paying the overhead of carrying the PDA around and constantly entering information.
Once those requirement were gone, it turned out that all of the 'essential' additional uses I found for it are not worth the overhead of carrying the thing around.
Hanging up after a pause worked well for me until I started getting phone calls from my young nieces and nephews. The little kids would often get confused by the phone, so I started gently asking if anyone was there. This meant that telemarketers got throught more often, so I started following the instructions on Junkbusters.org. It took a few months, but the frequency of telemarketing calls is way down now.
Given that it is the legislators job to listen to and represent the views of their constituents (and no one else) then it actually does matter if people sending in email reside in that legislators district or not.
Representing constituents is one of a legislators most important responsibilities, but it is not their only responsibility. The constitution says that they "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution" and from the senate's "How the Senate Works" page the current oath is:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
A legislator has to represent constituents, represent the whole country, act consistently with personal moral/religious beliefs, and get re-elected. People who
can reconcile all of this may at times appear to be slimey and unprincipled, but that is what is needed to make the compromises that allow us to work as a society.
Getting back to the topic of letters to a legislator, the article makes it sound like most legislators are at least trying to strike a balance - a staffer will read the email if it is from a constituent or if it is about an area the legislator is active in. This is probably a reasonable compromise.
The elections boards in those Florida counties were a pack of idiots to spend tens of millions of dollars on an expensive, complicated solution when they could have gotten an optical system at a tenth of the cost and spent the rest on educating the incompetent poll workers and voters.
A big advantage of 'scantron' type optical system is that they are understood by ordinary people and can be audited in a way that is understandable to ordinary people. To society as a whole this is a big advantage, but to election officials it is an annoyance. When an all-electronic election is disputed there is no basic physical evidence to fall back on, so the election officials can say "All of the built in audit procedures say it was valid, and the proper procedures were followed, so by definition the election must be correct". When a scantron election is disputed, they have to gather up the paper ballots, maybe re-scan them, maybe check to see that the marks on the paper correspond to what the tabulation equipment says,....
My classmates stayed in the class and basically slept through 2 workdays.
I find this to be the norm for most 'professionally taught' classes I take. I work for a big company, and have gotten a lot of training from both our internal people and external vendors. The standing joke is to compute our duty cycle while in class, i.e. the fraction of the time that we actually need to pay attention while in class. In college I was often at over 100%, I could not think quickly enough to keep up with the lecture and had to come back to it later to think it through properly. At work related classes it is rare to be any higher than 20%.
They usually teach these classes based on what they call the 'Adult Learning Model,' which seems to basically mean they make sure that each student must completely understand each piece of information before moving on to the next. It also seems to mean that the thought process must be simplified to the point that a trainer can follow it. This seems to work well for simple fact based courses like 'How to Fill Out Your On-Line Timecard, works adequately for slightly more complex topics like 'How to Track Your Order Using Our New ERP System', and is a complete failure for complex subjects.
There have been a few pleasant exceptions over the years, classes were I actually learned a lot about a difficult subject, but these were usually outside the usual training process and were taught by people who love the subject material.
I think a lot of it comes down to the difference between training and education. The usual corporate training process is good for teaching us how to follow procedure, but not very good at teaching anything that requires independent thought.
We're past the point where we should be teaching ourselves elaborate new routines to accommodate new technologies.
I disagree, at least for things like a keyboard that that I use a lot. If the return on my time invested in learning the new technique is high eneough, I might even put a few years into it (How many years did most of us put into learning to use a pencil and paper ?) Of course, I am not willing do invest a lot of effort into something that I will use only rarely.
"We're not a Software Company" can also be read as:
We don't know how to manage software projects.
We don't want to waste management's attention on software.
Standard solutions are more reliable, because they are not dependant on one or two key people. Or even:
If we admitted at the outset what a big job we have in front of us nobody would approve it.
An almost religious belief that at least the first three of these truisms are always true seems to drive infrastructure projects here at the very large, supposedly very technically sophisticated, company where I work.We start out buying a "turn-key solution", find out that it is not quite so turn-key, hire consultants and contractors to customize it, then finally after a year or two of work we end up with a system that is at least as custom as we would have developed in house, with the main difference being that the key people are contractors instead of employees.
Of course, the managers here would disagree strongly - they are sure that their careful adherence to these well known truths has saved us from certain disaster.
First, get the CS degree. You may end up doing completely unrelated work, but having a technical degree makes it a lot easier to get and keep a decent job, even if you never use any of the material you studied.
Second, treat your degree like a general degree in some random science. Most people who graduate with a BS in chemistry, biology, physics,... find that the only good 'job' that wants that specific degree is grad school, and if they don't want to go to grad school they end up finding a job that is only slightly related to thier degree. You may have to search a lot harder to find a decent job like this, and it will probably pay less than a CS job, but it might get you into something you find interesting.
Another option to consider is grad school in a field that interests you. This is what I did. Some grad schools are open to people making a big switch in fields, while others are not, so you will have to look around a bit to find one. You will probably have to take a lot of undergrad classes in your new field. In my case I had to take all of the junior level and senior level courses in my first year in grad school, and I barely survived, but in the end it was worth it as it allowed me to get work that I enjoy.
Finally, it sounds like your still in your early 20's, so taking a few dead end paths won't effect you badly in the long run. Do what seems right, and if it turns out not to be right just start over.
They want me to pay blind. In a bookstore or such I can look at the actual book I'm thinking of buying and decide whether I want it or not. A lot of online content providers want me to pay to even be able to find out what information they have. I may be willing to do that for specialized sources where the reputation of the source is enough, but not for things like general news.
This is one reason I usually do not want to pay for content sight-unseen. I have found that often the fee based sites deliver worse quality than the free sites. The mindset of many of the
fee based sites seems to be 'how can we charge the
most for the least' while many of the free sites seem to be dedicated to the content first, with the ads or other revenue sources being seen as a means to the end rather than as the purpose of the site.
If there were a good, reliable, 'editor' who vouched for the quality of the data then I would be more willing to pay for the data without seeing it first. This is similar to the reason I am usually willing to order an O'Reilly book based on the title alone, but for most other publishers I will buy the book only if I can see it first or if it is recommended by someone I trust. The Wall Street Journal is about the only fee based online service I can think of that has a good enough reputation that people are routinely willing to pay for it in advance.
Another point is that if they are charging me the ads better not be annoying - if the pop up or flash or.... and I have paid for it I really resent it and will not pay that site for anything else unless I have no other choice.
Handspring is a Palm clone which allows an accessory card to be installed. Zilog is advertising a roll-your-own wireless kit which can be used with a handspring to create a local wireless network. The problem is that it "will be available Q2" and that it appears to you will have to do a lot of the engineering yourself. The web site says the kit includes:
Schematic
Bill of materials
Sample printed circuit board layout
VISOR interface software
Wave Communicator User's Manual
Z87L02 Emulator User's Manual
The web site says "These kits enable you to embed Internet connectivity into appliances at an extremely low price," so if the price really is low they might be a lot of fun. I don't know if anyone will be selling these as a higher level assembly, so they might not be very practical even if the cost is low.
I've been using check free via my credit union for a few monthes now, and they have been OK, but not great.
The basic method is that, after you set up all of your accounts, you fill in a form and tell them to write a (virtual ?) check on your account. This works, but isn't as good or convenient as it should be.
The problems I have with Check Free are:
The web interface is a bit kludgy (but it works, and the quick-pay option is reasonably quick)
You have to keep re-entering your PIN every transaction, which gets to be a pain.
Few companies do online billing (actually a lot of them do, but only one of the companies I need to pay uses Check Free)
Integration with my credit union account is non-existant. I have to download a QIF file, import it into quicken, purge any duplicates, log onto a different system to see my credit union account, download another QIF from the credit union,.... It ends up being faster and easier than keeping paper records, but not nearly as fast and easy as it could be.
One very nice feature is that you can set up a payment to occur in the future, so that you can keep your money as long as possible and don't have to remember to mail the bill at the last minute.
Overall it saves me some time, and costs about $0.05 more per bill than paying by check, but they could (and should) do a much better job.
If you will be working for a large company, you won't usually need a PE. The time it might be usefull is if you want to work as a consultant or for a consulting company. One important point I haven't seen mentioned is that the tests cover a lot of subjects most people don't use after graduation, so if you wait until you actually need the PE, you will have to do a _lot_ of re-learning. I didn't take the PE when I graduated 15 years ago, and recently considered a career change where the PE would be usefull. I was amazed at how hard it would be to re-learn everything today. (In my case I decided it wasn't worth the trouble)
Slashdot Mirror
One downside of free WiFi is that there is no one to call when it stops working. I live in Mountain View, and when Google WiFi first came out it was good enough that I dropped my DSL. I was very happy with it for about a year, but then it got intermittent at my house, working well on some days and not at all on others. After a few more months it wouldn't work at all from early evening until after midnight, presumably because everyone else was also trying to use it at that time. After that I switched to Comcast - they are overpriced and a pain to deal with, but at least when I call to complain that my service has failed they manage to fix it eventually.
As a side note, it always worked well a few hundred feet from my house, so I assume that the back end was working OK.
Back when Hewlett Packard was one of the greatest companies in the world they gave 12% of pre-tax profits as 'Profit Sharing.' Profit sharing was paid out twice per year. Almost everyone in the company was included. In good years each profit sharing check would be close to one months pay, in bad years they would be much smaller.
HP no longer gives the 12%. Agilent (a spin off of HP) doesn't have any profit to share, and if they did they would give far less than 12% of pre-tax profits. They both have changed to formulas based on factors like return on assets and revenue growth, with an explicit goal of sharing less of the profit.
Profit sharing had the obvious motivational benefits, but it also made employees feel that they were part of a great company and not simply cogs in a machine. This was part of what made HP so successful.
You can debate whether HP was so successful that it could afford to give 12%, or was HP so successful because it gave 12%. My belief is that profit sharing was one of many things that made HP great. By itself it neither makes nor breaks the company, but it was one important factor in HP's former success.
I think jaredmauch hits the nail on the head when he says "You're not talking about your 'Average' ISP." AOL is very paternalistic, giving its customers a nice, safe, easy environment that you or I might find infuriating but that some people really like. Those people who want 'somebody who knows computers' to manage their 'online experience' are the same people who want 'someone who knows computers' to manage their PC.
I think AOL may be accidentally backing themselves into a good business model. You buy the PC and sign up for AOL, and they take care of all of the rest of the technical stuff for you. I won't be signing up anytime soon, but I bet a lot of people would love the service.
Fred
The Crash Recovery Kit for Linux is a bare bones Linux system with a lot of useful utils you might need for crash recovery. It is useful for both Linux and Windows. Following the directions in their how-to, I was able to boot a crashed system, get networking working, and copy a bunch of NTFS files I really did not want to lose to another PC. It can also do a lot more, see their how-to for details.
Fred
You are right, they do know how to handle hydrogen industrially, and they can do it very well. The mechanics, plumbers, technicians etc who work with hydrogen are all very skilled and know all of the necessary tricks.
I am sure that if you were piping hydrogen from a big industrial facility to a big commercial power plant, with all of the infastructure that goes with big industrial chemical plants, it would be relatively safe and easy. The part I wonder about is sending it from small, decentralized generation facilities to small, decentralized fuel cells. With lots of small operations spread all over, it would be difficult to maintain the infrastructure and experience needed to handle hydrogen safely and efficiently.
Of course, I guess the same thing could have been said about electricity 100 years ago.
Actually, hydrogen pipelines are the most leak-prone plumbing I have ever worked with. H2 is a small molecule, it will slip through the tiniest imperfections in your plumbing. I was working at lab scale, so we could be exceptionally careful and attentive to detail, and we still had problems.
The same plumbing techniques that worked perfectly with nitrogen or helium were barely acceptable for hydrogen. Valves and other fittings had to be in perfect condition or there was no chance that they would work. We could make it work, but it took a lot of effort and a lot of testing and rework. This was mainly with 1/4 and 1/2 inch diameter tubing, bigger lines are even harder to get leak tight.
You might consider the aluminum structural framing used in a lot of custom industrial equipment. This is basically bolt-together aluminum channel. It is fairly easy to put together, makes a very nice rigid frame, is easy to attach brackets to, can be cut with simple hand tools, and some brands look pretty good. A lot of small to mid-sized custom industrial equipment is in boxes built with these frames - often with rectangular tubing forming the edges of a box and glass or PVC sheets forming the face of the box. Using stained glass in place of the window glass or PVC seems a natural fit.
The problem would be that this stuff is priced for industrial users. To get an idea of what is available and what it costs look up structural framing at McMaster Carr. McMaster Carr is a full-priced industrial supply company, so nothing there is cheap, but this type of stuff is hard to get cheap. If you can find somebody who is buying this stuff in bulk they might be willing to sell you some of their scrap pieces. The type of company that might have this stuff would be automation houses or custom machine builders.
A few of the many suppliers out there are:
Fred
If you are in metal recycling plants, you probably have compressed air available. If the compressed air is relatively clean and oil free, you can do like a lot of industrial electronics cabinets do and feed compressed air into the cabinet. This cools the cabinet and also keeps the cabinet at positive pressure to keep other junk out.
The only place I have used this scheme is in a large factory with automatic hoists, large motors, and other noise sources. In that environment the noise is not noticeable, but in a home or office it might be intolerably loud.
The easiest way to do this is probably to leave the exhaust fans where they are now, leave all the existing inlets open, add a 1/4 inch tubing inlet with a valve to introduce the air, and slowly turn the valve up until the case pressure is just slightly positive with the exhaust fans running. (Measure the case pressure by finding an opening that is not near an exhaust fan and hold a piece of paper against the opening - when the paper starts to flutter you are just barely at positive pressure.)
To reduce the air used, and also reduce the noise, you can plug up all of the air inlets so that there is very little air exiting except at the exhaust fans. The downside of this is that if the compressed air goes off the PC will overheat since there is not enough air coming in. In industrial settings we usually had a pressure sensor and shut things down when the air pressure dropped for more than a minute or so, but this may not be appropriate for a PC.
If you wanted to get really extreme, you could water cool the cpu to an external heat exchanger, cooling the inside of the case in the process. Eliminate the exhaust fans, add in some circulating fans, plug most of the outlets, and set the air flow to keep the case pressure slightly positive. Of course, by the time you did all this you would essentially have an industrial PC and it would cost as much as an industrial PC.
One thing to watch out for if you do this, maintence people sometimes add oilers to airlines that previously had nice clean air (usually because they assume that the line is only being used to run pneumatic tools and they decide that it will be easier to maintain one big oiler on the supply line instead of lots of small oilers at each tool.) I can tell you from sad experience that if this happens you will have a thin film of oil on every surface inside the case and that it takes many hours to clean this up.
It doesn't surprise me that a few extremely successful people like Spielberg succeed brilliantly despite a less prestigious and possibly less rigorous education. What would surprise me is to find that the typical student applying to elite schools would not have a far more successful career after graduating from an elite school like Harvard than after graduating from a 'lesser' college like Cal State Long Beach.
To drastically oversimplify the situation, I have noticed that there are three broad groups of people in any almost every work or school situation:
- Inherently Successful People: People who will succeed brilliantly no matter what obstacles they face. Most of us like to think of ourselves as members of this group, but few of us really are.
- Ordinary People: People, often very smart, capable, and hard working, who given a few lucky breaks or good opportunities can capitalize on them to build a good career. These are the vast majority of the people I have known in school and at work.
- Screw-Ups: Screw ups are unable to do a good job, no matter what opportunities they are given and no matter how many breaks they receive. Fortunately few people are inherently screw ups, but there are always a few of them in any large group.
An Ivy League or Stanford education, a rich well connected family, friends in high places, and all of the other traditional predictors of success are nice but unnecessary bonuses for the inherently sucessful, a huge help to the vast majority of ordinary people, and very little help to the screw-ups.Why not just add a tax of 10 cents to every single phone call and reduce personal income taxes by the same amount ?
The actual amount might need to a bit of tweaking, I got 10 cents by assuming that telemarketers are successful on one in a thousand calls and that the average profit per sale is $100. Does anyone know real numbers ?
I guess I could do the same thing by getting my own 900 number, but that might be sort of difficult to implement unilaterally.
I used to have a job where I was never at my desk - I was either in meetings or on the production floor or working on a piece of equipment .... I would often have to find info, schedule meetings, call people, ... when I was nowhere near my desk. I used an hp200LX (an ancient DOS based PDA) that was very good, then 'upgraded' to a Handspring when the powers that be demanded that I keep my calendar up to date in Outlook.
I used the PDA a lot in those days, both for work and for personal use. I had all of my social and weekend activities scheduled in, I had all of my friends and families contact information, birthdays, ... entered in. I even had all of the recipes I like to cook programmed in (it is amazing how nice it is to be able to decide you want to cook something and just stop by the store to pick up the ingredients without having to go home and look up the recipe first.) I was completely addicted to the PDA and couldn't imagine how I had
survived without one. I was sure that even if I didn't need one for work I would continue
to use one.
I used the PDA almost daily for about 5 years, and then I changed jobs. I do a lot more programming now, and spend a lot of time at my desk. Meetings are either routine and planned long in advance or else impromptu 'are you available now ?' meetings. I slowly started to use the PDA less and less. It is now sitting in a drawer at home and hasn't been used in over a year. It turns out that my old job's requirement that I be able to schedule meetings at any time and keep my Outlook calendar up to date was in effect paying the overhead of carrying the PDA around and constantly entering information.
Once those requirement were gone, it turned out that all of the 'essential' additional uses I found for it are not worth the overhead of carrying the thing around.
Hanging up after a pause worked well for me until I started getting phone calls from my young nieces and nephews. The little kids would often get confused by the phone, so I started gently asking if anyone was there. This meant that telemarketers got throught more often, so I started following the instructions on Junkbusters.org. It took a few months, but the frequency of telemarketing calls is way down now.
Getting back to the topic of letters to a legislator, the article makes it sound like most legislators are at least trying to strike a balance - a staffer will read the email if it is from a constituent or if it is about an area the legislator is active in. This is probably a reasonable compromise.
I find this to be the norm for most 'professionally taught' classes I take. I work for a big company, and have gotten a lot of training from both our internal people and external vendors. The standing joke is to compute our duty cycle while in class, i.e. the fraction of the time that we actually need to pay attention while in class. In college I was often at over 100%, I could not think quickly enough to keep up with the lecture and had to come back to it later to think it through properly. At work related classes it is rare to be any higher than 20%.
They usually teach these classes based on what they call the 'Adult Learning Model,' which seems to basically mean they make sure that each student must completely understand each piece of information before moving on to the next. It also seems to mean that the thought process must be simplified to the point that a trainer can follow it. This seems to work well for simple fact based courses like 'How to Fill Out Your On-Line Timecard, works adequately for slightly more complex topics like 'How to Track Your Order Using Our New ERP System', and is a complete failure for complex subjects.
There have been a few pleasant exceptions over the years, classes were I actually learned a lot about a difficult subject, but these were usually outside the usual training process and were taught by people who love the subject material.
I think a lot of it comes down to the difference between training and education. The usual corporate training process is good for teaching us how to follow procedure, but not very good at teaching anything that requires independent thought.
I disagree, at least for things like a keyboard that that I use a lot. If the return on my time invested in learning the new technique is high eneough, I might even put a few years into it (How many years did most of us put into learning to use a pencil and paper ?) Of course, I am not willing do invest a lot of effort into something that I will use only rarely.
"We're not a Software Company" can also be read as:
We don't know how to manage software projects.
We don't want to waste management's attention on software.
Standard solutions are more reliable, because they are not dependant on one or two key people.
Or even:
If we admitted at the outset what a big job we have in front of us nobody would approve it.
An almost religious belief that at least the first three of these truisms are always true seems to drive infrastructure projects here at the very large, supposedly very technically sophisticated, company where I work.We start out buying a "turn-key solution", find out that it is not quite so turn-key, hire consultants and contractors to customize it, then finally after a year or two of work we end up with a system that is at least as custom as we would have developed in house, with the main difference being that the key people are contractors instead of employees.
Of course, the managers here would disagree strongly - they are sure that their careful adherence to these well known truths has saved us from certain disaster.
That is something I would be willing to pay for!!
First, get the CS degree. You may end up doing completely unrelated work, but having a technical degree makes it a lot easier to get and keep a decent job, even if you never use any of the material you studied.
... find that the only good 'job' that wants that specific degree is grad school, and if they don't want to go to grad school they end up finding a job that is only slightly related to thier degree. You may have to search a lot harder to find a decent job like this, and it will probably pay less than a CS job, but it might get you into something you find interesting.
Second, treat your degree like a general degree in some random science. Most people who graduate with a BS in chemistry, biology, physics,
Another option to consider is grad school in a field that interests you. This is what I did. Some grad schools are open to people making a big switch in fields, while others are not, so you will have to look around a bit to find one. You will probably have to take a lot of undergrad classes in your new field. In my case I had to take all of the junior level and senior level courses in my first year in grad school, and I barely survived, but in the end it was worth it as it allowed me to get work that I enjoy.
Finally, it sounds like your still in your early 20's, so taking a few dead end paths won't effect you badly in the long run. Do what seems right, and if it turns out not to be right just start over.
Good Luck!!!
If there were a good, reliable, 'editor' who vouched for the quality of the data then I would be more willing to pay for the data without seeing it first. This is similar to the reason I am usually willing to order an O'Reilly book based on the title alone, but for most other publishers I will buy the book only if I can see it first or if it is recommended by someone I trust. The Wall Street Journal is about the only fee based online service I can think of that has a good enough reputation that people are routinely willing to pay for it in advance.
Another point is that if they are charging me the ads better not be annoying - if the pop up or flash or .... and I have paid for it I really resent it and will not pay that site for anything else unless I have no other choice.
- Schematic
- Bill of materials
- Sample printed circuit board layout
- VISOR interface software
- Wave Communicator User's Manual
- Z87L02 Emulator User's Manual
The web site says "These kits enable you to embed Internet connectivity into appliances at an extremely low price," so if the price really is low they might be a lot of fun. I don't know if anyone will be selling these as a higher level assembly, so they might not be very practical even if the cost is low.Fred
The basic method is that, after you set up all of your accounts, you fill in a form and tell them to write a (virtual ?) check on your account. This works, but isn't as good or convenient as it should be.
The problems I have with Check Free are:
- The web interface is a bit kludgy (but it works, and the quick-pay option is reasonably quick)
- You have to keep re-entering your PIN every transaction, which gets to be a pain.
- Few companies do online billing (actually a lot of them do, but only one of the companies I need to pay uses Check Free)
- Integration with my credit union account is non-existant. I have to download a QIF file, import it into quicken, purge any duplicates, log onto a different system to see my credit union account, download another QIF from the credit union,
.... It ends up being faster and easier than keeping paper records, but not nearly as fast and easy as it could be.
One very nice feature is that you can set up a payment to occur in the future, so that you can keep your money as long as possible and don't have to remember to mail the bill at the last minute.Overall it saves me some time, and costs about $0.05 more per bill than paying by check, but they could (and should) do a much better job.
Fred
If you will be working for a large company, you won't usually need a PE. The time it might be usefull is if you want to work as a consultant or for a consulting company. One important point I haven't seen mentioned is that the tests cover a lot of subjects most people don't use after graduation, so if you wait until you actually need the PE, you will have to do a _lot_ of re-learning. I didn't take the PE when I graduated 15 years ago, and recently considered a career change where the PE would be usefull. I was amazed at how hard it would be to re-learn everything today. (In my case I decided it wasn't worth the trouble)