So why is it that it costs about 50 times to make a "movie" as it does for a TV show? How much is special effects, and how much for actors, and since it's the same companies who make TV shows and movies, where is all the rest going?
Where's a real cost analysis (and where do the folks who pushed the DMCA come into this)?
So, not having a chance to read the study this morning, does it take into effect the price of CDs, the record company insistance on them being shorter and shorter*, and the Bush Depression?
No, no, don't pay your electric bill, buy a handfull of CD's....
mark
* I have Phil Och's "I Ain't Marchin' Any More", from around '68... and it's about 15 seconds too *long* for a 45 min. tape. How long's your current favorite from the Big Name Band - 27? 25 min? While a CD can hold an hour?
Of course both elections were *stolen*, and if you think I shuold shut up, then I suppose you think that the Germans who objected in 1932 and 1936 should have shut up and "supported their government", too.
Yes, it *is* almost that bad, though perhaps fascist Italy under Mussolini is a more appropriate comparison (and no, Mussolini didn't make the trains to run on time).
Oh, and while we're at it, those who want me to shut up can arrange for the public repudiation by everyone on the right of ever snide comment, "joke", and attack on FREELY ELECTED President Bill Clinton for the last six years, and a vow to never make them again.
Ok, I was the one asking this, so I see that I should have clarified:
first, I was talking about a Real o/s (*nix), not WinDoze.
Second, the thing that I was worried about is thrashing. As someone mentioned in their post concerning the difference between page space and swap space, page tables, that address the swap space, grow as well, and the lookups, no matter how efficient, start bogging down and adding overhead to the swap. For such reasons, too much page space can be as bad as too little.
So, with that, I'd like to single out Junta (36770) Anonymous Coward (I use this) edward.virtually and especially Anonymous Coward (Read (Please!))
The problem you have to worry about is, of course, HR (come the Revolution, don't line them up and shoot them, just lay them down and pave the roads with them). Worry about the phrase, "overqualified".
Related to this was someone's post concerning the falling number of programmers, and the H1B visa (instead of higher salaries). I'm not sure it was higher salaries that were needed. Instead, corporate (I almost wrote coprophite, which they are) wanted to cut our salaries. Further, if you're out of the country, they don't have anywhere near the ability to find out what you actually know, as opposed to claiming you know (oh, yes, I know ASPECREsix, I work five years on that...), *and* they're mostly asking for a laundry list of experience that covers everything that the last two or three people to leave knew, so there's no training or ramp up (and so you can do all of their jobs, cutting staff, overworking you, and increasing profits for the CEO).
Picking up skills in COTS is worth at least as much, if not more, esp. if you can claim that you have a year or two, at least, in those skills. (Well, you did it in a job four years ago, and you did it last year, that's three years, right?)
a) you're an idiot. Learn to type. b) I want a keyboard that I can balance in my lap, *easily*: on without a numeric keypad, which I've almost never used (except when I was doing data entry, a LOOOOONG time ago).
You could win big in the lottery, almost as easily.
I've *got* a BS in CIS, and my resume shows jobs back to '89 (I leave out the stuff before that, because it wasn't in Unix), and I've been looking for six months. "Oh, sorry, you don't have C+-script in Aunt, Commix, under Frunix 12.4, and 5 years of Orabase SQLiposuction (released four years ago), we've got no interest in you."
Bill Clinton was accused of being a "serial liar". Bush lies to Congress, lies to the world, and lies to you, personally, on tv and in the paper, and any disagreement, no matter how mild, is "partisan spin". We have the official Miistry of Truth, Faux News, as "the most trusted news source".
Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy for more than 20 years, and Hitler's ally, and, as the *first* fascist ruler, spoke with some authority when he liked to say, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." Meanwhile, Dick Cheney's golden parachute just ended this year, I believe, from Halliburton, recipient of multi-billion mo-bid US federal contracts from Iraq to New Orleans... and does anyone have the nerve to tell me that such does not fit the definition of fascism? (If so, I suggest you have a seance, or get a oieja board, and argue with Mussolini's ghost.)
This is, literally, what Orwell warned about. Meanwhile, the American Christian Fascist party, aka the Republican Party, seemed to have thought it was a game plan.
If you voted for them, you, personally, are a Good German. If you didn't vote, under the heading of "I don't like anyone", then you did NOTHING to fight it, and it's *your* fault. "The only thing necessary for evil to win is for good [persons] to do nothing."
And you'll note that this business-oriented government has allowed our manufacturing capacity to be destroyed, literally, in the name of "globalisation". We can't even make all our own steel....
mark, and yes, I *am* frustrated by folks who bite their nose to
spite their face
The only thing that slows down languages like C is damn eye candy.
Java, on the other hand... at work, running a (dual core? dual processor?) pentium, connected to a fast RISC 6000 AIX box, a small Java app I wrote takes nearly half a minute to come up.
But then, halfway up the lerning curver for Java, I'm also working on an article entitled "The Failure of Java", and one insight I've had, just last week, while looking at some professional code that's production at a Fortune 50 company: Java, at least in a class, not only actively, but agressively encourages global variables. Staring at this, it struck me that I *have* worked in a language like that... except we call them subroutines... in COBOL.
I would issue a school policy banning them all. I would all electronic devices other than a calcluator and a watch confiscated, and require the parents to come retrieve them.
No passing notes, electronic or otherwise, in class. They have no part in what the students are allegedly doing: learning.
On the other hand, searching the data, unless there was probable cause to believe that they were passing test data, violates the US Constitution. No public school is in loco parentis.
And no, if my kids were still in school, they would *not* carry phones. They can call when they get home, the way kids have done for 50 years.
I looked up this organization's site, and just sent a formally indignant email to the SOB, asking why he hadn't included millinarians or other fundamentalist Christians, and told him, in so many words, that this was a blatently bigoted statement, and that I would post this to enough other sites, to suggest that he could not ignore this, and demanded a public retraction, putting Witches in with gangs.
For the real Satanists (not the stupid kids who want to freak out their parents), sorry, you can try to explain to him the difference between the Christian's version of Satanism and yours. I doubt he's capable of understanding, though....
Why not have it totally publicly-controlled, and let the companies bid to install and supply? Sort of like, ohhh, the highways? Let the federal government have the backbone, and city and county own the local?
Oh, that would be *so* nasty to the poor phone and cable companies CEO's, they wouldn't be as rich as they are now....
On the other hand, *all* contracts would have *automatic* punitive clauses for failure to fullfill contract specifics. Otherwise, you'd have a situation like Austin, TX, a dozen years ago, when the cable company DID NOT UPGRADE THE CABLE, set up a strike to try to break the union, then had the gall to tell the city that they should renew their contract, and this time they'd upgrade the cable....
mark "I do think that Lucy van Pelt was the CEO, and Charlie Brown mayor"
Ok, my wife is a former NASA engineer, and used to be one of the top folks with actual go/no go decision (her specialty was hypergolics). Here's some of what she wrote after yesterday's attempt (and if the language bothers you, tough: she's ex-Navy ):
************ For the record, speaking as someone who can see the goddamn launch pads from my roof: there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the last lightning had been over four hours ago (gave me an excuse to quit mowing), and the nearest drop of rain was in west Orlando, some fifty or sixty miles away.
I was a member of the "go / no-go" team during Return To Flight in 1988. There was no hesitation or wimpiness in our hours of pre-poll discussion, and when Safety was called on during the poll, we all but cheered and danced yelling "GO!" You could cut the tension with a damascus sword, but there was no greasy sweat and shifty eyes.
Friday, I made a snide prediction to the local paper: they were gong to count down to the built-in T-9 minute hold and sit there until they got a weather excuse. I should have made it for money, but there would not have been many takers among the spaceflight-savvy. It's practically a ritual.
I'll go out on a limb on this one, since I'm up against the bushitsta's "You WILL launch so George can give his speech and distract attention from the Iraq disaster" orders, but if they have anyone with any balls at all on the launch team, this time they'll count down to the five minute mark and call it off after a five-minute hold on some computer-glitch excuse. (At T-5, they start the APU recorders, which puts them on an MFP -- the APUs are strictly limited on run time.)
(Sorry, MFP isn't in the NASA handbook. That's Major Fuckup Point.)
Then they'll try again on July 4th, just for #$%!ing show. Goddess of fire, protect the astronauts. But it wouldn't break my heart if John Ellis and company were doing a photo-op on Monday and a tetroxide valve blew. ************ it ain't the weather they're afraid of. That's their EXCUSE.
Put it this way -- the ten minutes of cross-chat I bothered to listen to sounded like full-blown panic. "O-ten-six is a negative" means nothing to anyone who hasn't worked countdown, but what that means is THEY COULD NOT GET A SENSOR RESPONSE FROM THE MAIN ENGINE TURBINES. As in, the fucking engines weren't saying yes or no as to whether they would even turn on. Flood a system with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and hit the "on" button, and if the turbines don't spin up, you have a very large bomb with the fuse burning down fast.
And that was only ONE of the "re-check" (means "no fucking response") calls that I heard, and I only bothered to turn on the TV to win a bet.
Rain and lightning here as of 0900. Clear sky by noon. Bets on the T-5 stall still better than a lotto ticket.
You know that your culture has become what Douglas Adams would, or Terry Pratchett will, have considered fodder when you chair comes supplied with a manual.
I've worked at places ranging from my current Fortune 50 employer, to a Baby Bell, to companies of six and twelve people, including me, total. What I've seen, more and more over the last ten years or so is, esp. in large companies, the growth of PHB's.
Their latest ploy is to slow any work to a crawl by requiring an unbelievable amount of paperwork, with half a dozen signatures (including director level) for every. single. change. no matter how small. They *claim* this is SOx (Sarbanes-Oxley) compliance; in reality, it's upper management paralysis, along with CYA and the ability, should they ever be questioned, to literally drown any questioner in documents.
As a side note, a story here on slashdot a few years ago noted that ISO 9000 didn't guarantee quality, only that you could document the worst day you ever had. That's what this alleged SOx compliance is.. or to hide anything under it.
You *might* want to go for a smaller company, or a new division of a larger one. They might be more, um, agile, and concerned with results rather than CYA paperwork.
*IF* you can find one. The other option is, if you were in military IT, I'd guess you have a clearance, and there's a *lot* of (unnecessary) requirements for that, which may give you a leg up on the rest of us.
Right now, I'm on an out-of-state contract. Money was tight, or I'd never have taken it. It ain't no fun to live in a bloody motel room except for a three-day weekend ever other week.
If you might wind up moving, or the opportunity is so good, because it will lead to something in the near term (within a year or so). Otherwise, pass.
I rather like one person's comment, about an overview of the field, some modern languages... and assembler. When it gets down to the silicon, and you're hours into a debugging session, there are times that you *need* to understand some concepts down at that level.
Other basics - HTML and CSS, Java (for now), and a good procedural language. Maybe C, maybe Perl (there's *so* much difference in syntax ). But DON'T expect to spend your entire career doing Java, or Ajax, or Achiilles, or other Trojan War heros, or Emerald, Ruby, or any other shiny fad language. The real difference between most languages is trivial syntax.
As I say in interviews, anyone who doesn't expect to have to learn new languages and technologies, usually on the job, with no training, when you walk in the door (or your manager walks through their door), then you're in the *wrong* business.
What's been done with cellphones has been a massive "triumph" of marketing over anything resembling usefullness.
- A timy phone with no cover, allowing anything you bump, including
the keys in your pocket, to dial Moldavia in the FSSR, and
which actively encouraged idiots who thought we wanted to
hear their "private" conversations 30 feet away, as they
yelled into their phones
- "cool" screens, which almost can't be read outdoors in the
daytime, and, my personal "favorite",
- the idea that anyone wanted to surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen
Remember that the whole idea of the idiot thing is to make phone calls....
mark, who is also irritated that I can't use 10-10 dialaround
on mine
As someone who spent a lot of time in the streets fighting *against* 'Nam, and who has several close friends who are ex-Marines who volunteered to go, let me point out the ultimate immorality of the invasion and conquest of Iraq - there is no difference between Iraq and 'Nam. The US government made up, out of whole cloth, the reasons for the invasion; the US set up a puppet government (no one who won't toady for us need apply for positions of power).
We're the ones running the war... and the people get *nothing*. Try reading things like the Baghdad "girl blogger", or any of the other people sources, and you'll find the the US media *vastly* UNDERPLAY how bad it is for ordinary Iraqis.
Getting past that, do you really think that a few technogadgets will "overcome" the Mujahadeem, who broke the Red Army? Why should this be any different? That's *exactly* the same as the Air Force attitude, that you can "bomb a people into submission". The RW truth is, of course, as I've read so many times, both in opinion and in history, that the only way is with boots on the ground... and whatever gadgets you come up with, if they don't want you there, they'll find ways to use your gadgets against you. Think of the Rodney King video, or the disposable cell phone.
mark, *very* tired of folks who can't believe that
"their" government are crooks and war criminals
From the little I know about *REAL* ninjas, I would most certainly agree with his view that the current idea of a ninja is pathetic.
Time for a history lesson, boyos and grlls: this is allegedly a true story of the ultimate ninja, back in the 16th century.
He was hired to kill a general. He hid in the general's outhouse, down in the shit and piss, breathing through a reed, until the general came in to make use of it. He killed him by impaling him with a spear up the rectum, then stayed hidden in the shit for another three days, until they gave up looking, and he could escape.
Ready to emulate him? No? Then stop running off at the mouth about ninjas, and go play with your Legos (tm), and stop "ninja this" and "ninja that".
A dozen years ago, a friend of mine who was a long-time mainframe systems programmer, told me that not i/o, but in straight CPU power, a 33MHz 386 had the processing power that an IBM 370/168, which most companies ran on in the late seventies.
Instead, we have friggin' eye candy that makes our xGHz 686 run like an 8088, or an 286, if we're *lucky*.
Yeah, you're doin' *so* much more with your computer power.
Excuse me, the "failure got 3000 civilians killed"? What about the presidential security briefing, a month before 9/11, entitled "bin Laden plans to strike inside the US"?
And what about the US MURDERING somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis, on the basis of no WMDs?
Now, unless you think that we've spent tens of billions of dollars on what, three? four? five? (CIA, FBI, NSA, Army intel, Pentagon Intel, etc) agencies completely staffed by clones of Maxwell Smart, the only intelligence failure, either through ideological blinders or deliberately for ideological reasons, is the administration and the GOP.
Slashdot Mirror
So why is it that it costs about 50 times to make a "movie" as it does for a TV show? How much is special effects, and how much for actors, and since it's the same companies who make TV shows and movies, where is all the rest going?
Where's a real cost analysis (and where do the folks who pushed the DMCA come into this)?
mark
So, not having a chance to read the study this morning, does it take into effect the price of CDs, the record company insistance on them being shorter and shorter*, and the Bush Depression?
No, no, don't pay your electric bill, buy a handfull of CD's....
mark
* I have Phil Och's "I Ain't Marchin' Any More", from around '68... and it's about 15 seconds too *long* for a 45 min. tape. How long's your current favorite from the Big Name Band - 27? 25 min? While a CD can hold an hour?
Of course both elections were *stolen*, and if you think I shuold shut up, then I suppose you think that the Germans who objected in 1932 and 1936 should have shut up and "supported their government", too.
Yes, it *is* almost that bad, though perhaps fascist Italy under Mussolini is a more appropriate comparison (and no, Mussolini didn't make the trains to run on time).
Oh, and while we're at it, those who want me to shut up can arrange for the public repudiation by everyone on the right of ever snide comment, "joke", and attack on FREELY ELECTED President Bill Clinton for the last six years, and a vow to never make them again.
No? Then *YOU* *SHUT* *UP*.
mark
After skimming the responses, I think it's time to dig out my old floppys for the best programmer's editor I've know, and run Brief under Wine....
mark "column copy, too!"
Ok, I was the one asking this, so I see that I should have clarified:
first, I was talking about a Real o/s (*nix), not WinDoze.
Second, the thing that I was worried about is thrashing. As someone mentioned in their post concerning the difference between page space and swap space, page tables, that address the swap space, grow as well, and the lookups, no matter how efficient, start bogging down and adding overhead to the swap. For such reasons, too much page space can be as bad as too little.
So, with that, I'd like to single out
Junta (36770)
Anonymous Coward (I use this)
edward.virtually
and especially
Anonymous Coward (Read (Please!))
for their thoughtful and useful discussions.
mark
Let's see, according to the story, you go around the magnetic field, and when you get to where you started, you have energy.
And this is different than a generator how?
mark, taking a train (diesel generator, electric motor) home....
The problem you have to worry about is, of course, HR (come the Revolution, don't line them up and shoot them, just lay them down and pave the roads with them). Worry about the phrase, "overqualified".
Related to this was someone's post concerning the falling number of programmers, and the H1B visa (instead of higher salaries). I'm not sure it was higher salaries that were needed. Instead, corporate (I almost wrote coprophite, which they are) wanted to cut our salaries. Further, if you're out of the country, they don't have anywhere near the ability to find out what you actually know, as opposed to claiming you know (oh, yes, I know ASPECREsix, I work five years on that...), *and* they're mostly asking for a laundry list of experience that covers everything that the last two or three people to leave knew, so there's no training or ramp up (and so you can do all of their jobs, cutting staff, overworking you, and increasing profits for the CEO).
Picking up skills in COTS is worth at least as much, if not more, esp. if you can claim that you have a year or two, at least, in those skills. (Well, you did it in a job four years ago, and you did it last year, that's three years, right?)
mark
a) you're an idiot. Learn to type.
b) I want a keyboard that I can balance in my lap, *easily*: on without a numeric keypad, which I've almost never used (except when I was doing data entry, a LOOOOONG time ago).
mark
You could win big in the lottery, almost as easily.
I've *got* a BS in CIS, and my resume shows jobs back to '89 (I leave out the stuff before that, because it wasn't in Unix), and I've been looking for six months. "Oh, sorry, you don't have C+-script in Aunt, Commix, under Frunix 12.4, and 5 years of Orabase SQLiposuction (released four years ago), we've got no interest in you."
mark, software develper, Unix/Linux sysadmin, software configuration/build/release management"
Bill Clinton was accused of being a "serial liar". Bush lies to Congress, lies to the world, and lies to you, personally, on tv and in the paper, and any disagreement, no matter how mild, is "partisan spin". We have the official Miistry of Truth, Faux News, as "the most trusted news source".
Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy for more than 20 years, and Hitler's ally, and, as the *first* fascist ruler, spoke with some authority when he liked to say, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." Meanwhile, Dick Cheney's golden parachute just ended this year, I believe, from Halliburton, recipient of multi-billion mo-bid US federal contracts from Iraq to New Orleans... and does anyone have the nerve to tell me that such does not fit the definition of fascism? (If so, I suggest you have a seance, or get a oieja board, and argue with Mussolini's ghost.)
This is, literally, what Orwell warned about. Meanwhile, the American Christian Fascist party, aka the Republican Party, seemed to have thought it was a game plan.
If you voted for them, you, personally, are a Good German. If you didn't vote, under the heading of "I don't like anyone", then you did NOTHING to fight it, and it's *your* fault. "The only thing necessary for evil to win is for good [persons] to do nothing."
And you'll note that this business-oriented government has allowed our manufacturing capacity to be destroyed, literally, in the name of "globalisation". We can't even make all our own steel....
mark, and yes, I *am* frustrated by folks who bite their nose to
spite their face
The only thing that slows down languages like C is damn eye candy.
Java, on the other hand... at work, running a (dual core? dual processor?) pentium, connected to a fast RISC 6000 AIX box, a small Java app I wrote takes nearly half a minute to come up.
But then, halfway up the lerning curver for Java, I'm also working on an article entitled "The Failure of Java", and one insight I've had, just last week, while looking at some professional code that's production at a Fortune 50 company: Java, at least in a class, not only actively, but agressively encourages global variables. Staring at this, it struck me that I *have* worked in a language like that... except we call them subroutines... in COBOL.
mark "Java: COBOL in a sexy suit"
I would issue a school policy banning them all. I would all electronic devices other than a calcluator and a watch confiscated, and require the parents to come retrieve them.
No passing notes, electronic or otherwise, in class. They have no part in what the students are allegedly doing: learning.
On the other hand, searching the data, unless there was probable cause to believe that they were passing test data, violates the US Constitution. No public school is in loco parentis.
And no, if my kids were still in school, they would *not* carry phones. They can call when they get home, the way kids have done for 50 years.
mark "like me and my kids"
I looked up this organization's site, and just sent a formally indignant email to the SOB, asking why he hadn't included millinarians or other fundamentalist Christians, and told him, in so many words, that this was a blatently bigoted statement, and that I would post this to enough other sites, to suggest that he could not ignore this, and demanded a public retraction, putting Witches in with gangs.
For the real Satanists (not the stupid kids who want to freak out their parents), sorry, you can try to explain to him the difference between the Christian's version of Satanism and yours. I doubt he's capable of understanding, though....
mark
Why not have it totally publicly-controlled, and let the companies bid to install and supply? Sort of like, ohhh, the highways? Let the federal government have the backbone, and city and county own the local?
Oh, that would be *so* nasty to the poor phone and cable companies CEO's, they wouldn't be as rich as they are now....
On the other hand, *all* contracts would have *automatic* punitive clauses for failure to fullfill contract specifics. Otherwise, you'd have a situation like Austin, TX, a dozen years ago, when the cable company DID NOT UPGRADE THE CABLE, set up a strike to try to break the union, then had the gall to tell the city that they should renew their contract, and this time they'd upgrade the cable....
mark "I do think that Lucy van Pelt was the CEO, and Charlie Brown mayor"
Ok, my wife is a former NASA engineer, and used to be one of the top folks with actual go/no go decision (her specialty was hypergolics). Here's some of what she wrote after yesterday's attempt (and if the language bothers you, tough: she's ex-Navy ):
************
For the record, speaking as someone who can see the goddamn launch pads from
my roof: there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the last lightning had been
over four hours ago (gave me an excuse to quit mowing), and the nearest drop
of rain was in west Orlando, some fifty or sixty miles away.
I was a member of the "go / no-go" team during Return To Flight in 1988.
There was no hesitation or wimpiness in our hours of pre-poll discussion, and
when Safety was called on during the poll, we all but cheered and danced
yelling "GO!" You could cut the tension with a damascus sword, but there was
no greasy sweat and shifty eyes.
Friday, I made a snide prediction to the local paper: they were gong to count
down to the built-in T-9 minute hold and sit there until they got a weather
excuse. I should have made it for money, but there would not have been many
takers among the spaceflight-savvy. It's practically a ritual.
I'll go out on a limb on this one, since I'm up against the bushitsta's "You
WILL launch so George can give his speech and distract attention from the
Iraq disaster" orders, but if they have anyone with any balls at all on the
launch team, this time they'll count down to the five minute mark and call it
off after a five-minute hold on some computer-glitch excuse. (At T-5, they
start the APU recorders, which puts them on an MFP -- the APUs are strictly
limited on run time.)
(Sorry, MFP isn't in the NASA handbook. That's Major Fuckup Point.)
Then they'll try again on July 4th, just for #$%!ing show. Goddess of fire,
protect the astronauts. But it wouldn't break my heart if John Ellis and
company were doing a photo-op on Monday and a tetroxide valve blew.
************
it ain't the weather they're afraid of. That's their EXCUSE.
Put it this way -- the ten minutes of cross-chat I bothered to listen to
sounded like full-blown panic. "O-ten-six is a negative" means nothing to
anyone who hasn't worked countdown, but what that means is THEY COULD NOT GET
A SENSOR RESPONSE FROM THE MAIN ENGINE TURBINES. As in, the fucking engines
weren't saying yes or no as to whether they would even turn on. Flood a
system with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and hit the "on" button, and if
the turbines don't spin up, you have a very large bomb with the fuse burning
down fast.
And that was only ONE of the "re-check" (means "no fucking response") calls
that I heard, and I only bothered to turn on the TV to win a bet.
Rain and lightning here as of 0900. Clear sky by noon. Bets on the T-5 stall
still better than a lotto ticket.
You know that your culture has become what Douglas Adams would, or Terry Pratchett will, have considered fodder when you chair comes supplied with a manual.
mark
I've worked at places ranging from my current Fortune 50 employer, to a Baby Bell, to companies of six and twelve people, including me, total. What I've seen, more and more over the last ten years or so is, esp. in large companies, the growth of PHB's.
Their latest ploy is to slow any work to a crawl by requiring an unbelievable amount of paperwork, with half a dozen signatures (including director level) for every. single. change. no matter how small. They *claim* this is SOx (Sarbanes-Oxley) compliance; in reality, it's upper management paralysis, along with CYA and the ability, should they ever be questioned, to literally drown any questioner in documents.
As a side note, a story here on slashdot a few years ago noted that ISO 9000 didn't guarantee quality, only that you could document the worst day you ever had. That's what this alleged SOx compliance is.. or to hide anything under it.
You *might* want to go for a smaller company, or a new division of a larger one. They might be more, um, agile, and concerned with results rather than CYA paperwork.
*IF* you can find one. The other option is, if you were in military IT, I'd guess you have a clearance, and there's a *lot* of (unnecessary) requirements for that, which may give you a leg up on the rest of us.
mark
Right now, I'm on an out-of-state contract. Money was tight, or I'd never have taken it. It ain't no fun to live in a bloody motel room except for a three-day weekend ever other week.
If you might wind up moving, or the opportunity is so good, because it will lead to something in the near term (within a year or so). Otherwise, pass.
mark
I rather like one person's comment, about an overview of the field, some modern languages... and assembler. When it gets down to the silicon, and you're hours into a debugging session, there are times that you *need* to understand some concepts down at that level.
Other basics - HTML and CSS, Java (for now), and a good procedural language. Maybe C, maybe Perl (there's *so* much difference in syntax ). But DON'T expect to spend your entire career doing Java, or Ajax, or Achiilles, or other Trojan War heros, or Emerald, Ruby, or any other shiny fad language. The real difference between most languages is trivial syntax.
As I say in interviews, anyone who doesn't expect to have to learn new languages and technologies, usually on the job, with no training, when you walk in the door (or your manager walks through their door), then you're in the *wrong* business.
mark
What's been done with cellphones has been a massive "triumph" of marketing over anything resembling usefullness.
- A timy phone with no cover, allowing anything you bump, including
the keys in your pocket, to dial Moldavia in the FSSR, and
which actively encouraged idiots who thought we wanted to
hear their "private" conversations 30 feet away, as they
yelled into their phones
- "cool" screens, which almost can't be read outdoors in the
daytime, and, my personal "favorite",
- the idea that anyone wanted to surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen
Remember that the whole idea of the idiot thing is to make phone calls....
mark, who is also irritated that I can't use 10-10 dialaround
on mine
As someone who spent a lot of time in the streets fighting *against* 'Nam, and who has several close friends who are ex-Marines who volunteered to go, let me point out the ultimate immorality of the invasion and conquest of Iraq - there is no difference between Iraq and 'Nam. The US government made up, out of whole cloth, the reasons for the invasion; the US set up a puppet government (no one who won't toady for us need apply for positions of power).
We're the ones running the war... and the people get *nothing*. Try reading things like the Baghdad "girl blogger", or any of the other people sources, and you'll find the the US media *vastly* UNDERPLAY how bad it is for ordinary Iraqis.
Getting past that, do you really think that a few technogadgets will "overcome" the Mujahadeem, who broke the Red Army? Why should this be any different? That's *exactly* the same as the Air Force attitude, that you can "bomb a people into submission". The RW truth is, of course, as I've read so many times, both in opinion and in history, that the only way is with boots on the ground... and whatever gadgets you come up with, if they don't want you there, they'll find ways to use your gadgets against you. Think of the Rodney King video, or the disposable cell phone.
mark, *very* tired of folks who can't believe that
"their" government are crooks and war criminals
Dr. Flexi Jerkoff, from Flesh Gordon
"Stand back! I've got these Power Pasties, and I know how
to use them!"
mark
From the little I know about *REAL* ninjas, I would most certainly agree with his view that the current idea of a ninja is pathetic.
Time for a history lesson, boyos and grlls: this is allegedly a true story of the ultimate ninja, back in the 16th century.
He was hired to kill a general. He hid in the general's outhouse, down in the shit and piss, breathing through a reed, until the general came in to make use of it. He killed him by impaling him with a spear up the rectum, then stayed hidden in the shit for another three days, until they gave up looking, and he could escape.
Ready to emulate him? No? Then stop running off at the mouth about ninjas, and go play with your Legos (tm), and stop "ninja this" and "ninja that".
mark, no, I never had an intention to be a ninja
All this eye candy....
A dozen years ago, a friend of mine who was a long-time mainframe systems programmer, told me that not i/o, but in straight CPU power, a 33MHz 386 had the processing power that an IBM 370/168, which most companies ran on in the late seventies.
Instead, we have friggin' eye candy that makes our xGHz 686 run like an 8088, or an 286, if we're *lucky*.
Yeah, you're doin' *so* much more with your computer power.
mark
Excuse me, the "failure got 3000 civilians killed"? What about the presidential security briefing, a month before 9/11, entitled "bin Laden plans to strike inside the US"?
And what about the US MURDERING somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Iraqis, on the basis of no WMDs?
Now, unless you think that we've spent tens of billions of dollars on what, three? four? five? (CIA, FBI, NSA, Army intel, Pentagon Intel, etc) agencies completely staffed by clones of Maxwell Smart, the only intelligence failure, either through ideological blinders or deliberately for ideological reasons, is the administration and the GOP.
And the fools who voted for them.
mark