If you're not motivated enough to type "freelance programing" into Google or search Craigslist, you're not cut out for "off hours" contract work. You even say yourself you're not good at self motivation. Do you think your client is going to call you at 11:00 pm to keep you motivated?
A good contractor is self motivated and can produce quality work without having someone getting in their hair all day. They also have more availability than "after hours". Are you ready/able to handle client communication during your business day? When the contract project goes into crunch time, are you willing to let your day job suffer? Or give your part time job the finger? Are you familiar with the 1040 form and the schedule C?
If you are not fully committed to it, please do the rest of us a favor and don't bother. We don't need the bad rep. But if you are, go out there and take a big bite, and we're glad to have you, it can be very fun and rewarding.
I remember doing this back in high school on Atari 400's. Let's just say programing for speed on a membrane keyboard was the biggest challenge of the competition.
I guess they mean "Possibly" in the sense that they're just being pretentious.
DVD's: Case Logic 320 CD case. (which you can get refill pages for and put in more than 500 easily. See 8 disks on a page removable pages make it easy to keep them organized.)
Backups, software disks, etc: Spindle in the closet.
Disks I use regularly (Game CD's for copy protection, PS2 games, etc): 5 inch trigger cases.
I love the trigger cases, keep extra ones on hand to send when clients need CD sent to them. Paper sleeves don't protect in the mail, and jewel cases get broken too easily.
You say you got a "Fair" salary, but clearly you didn't because you feel screwed. You should have asked for more up front.
A start ups, especially web start ups, really only need talented people up front, then they have to get rid of them. Same reason you don't pay carpenters to come back to the house after they finish building it. That's the nature of the startup.
I'll echo what everyone else said. Either you need to get into the company before they have employees (in which case you'll likely get burned much more severely, but with better reward possibilities) or get there later, after they've shed their builders.
Please, no, not fingerprints. Sure, you can't loose them, but you can't change them. How is that secure? Just because it's hard to break it today doesn't mean it won't be trivial tomorrow. See
Bic pen vs Kryptonite Locks) Since we're dealing with physical access, it's impossible to determine when that day will come. (Unlike passwords where you can use pretty basic math to figure out how long it will take to brute force it.)
If someone manages to steal or forge my finger prints, my life is over. I can't ever have access to anything secure again. (If everything was secured with my fingerprint that is.)
On my systems we have three strikes and out. You get three chances to enter the correct password. After that it locks you out. Either you know the password or you need to go through the recovery process (which involves a timed lockout and a catchpa). We don't put too many restrictions on the content of the passwords, and we have very few recoveries. And so far, no unauthorized access. That we know of.
This is the kind of posts that make me want to subscribe to Slashdot just so I can get the satisfaction of tagging an article "stupid".
I've worked with a lot of people producing 3d environments over the years (Since 1996). Several projects called themselves "Web 2.0" but I guess that name finally stuck with an even more hyped technology.
The problems are:
1) Speed: It's slower than a web page. Always will be.
2) Unscanable: If I want to scroll through a web page I scroll through it. If I'm in a virtual environment there can be stuff on the "page" that's behind other stuff. Great for metaphor, but bad for someone trying to find something.
3) Difficult navigation: We have mouses. A mouse with a scroll wheel gives three dimensions of translation (move forward, sideways, and vertically). However to navigate a 3d space you need to add at least two axis of rotation (heading and pitch). Sure you can do that with holding mouse buttons, but it's counter intuitive and awkward. Would you like it if you had to hold the right mouse button down to move your mouse up and down?
4) Content creation is too hard. Sure 3d tools have gotten better, but compare the effort, knowledge and skill required to build a basic web page with building a 3d room. Even using notepad vs a full featured 3d application, notepad wins.
5) No content: Text is best in flat form. 2d images are best viewed without distortion. Audio is best heard without accounting for virtual proximity or room acoustics. As for browsing a 3d shop, it's about 100 times easier to photograph it from every angle than to build an accurate, detailed model.
C'mon! You're using an operating system 10 years old and you're complaining about not having enough new apps written for it? What's wrong with 'fox 1.5?
It's all the bitchy responses to something like this that makes me believe people who champion OSS's "free"ness is much more about users wanting something for "free" as in "don't have to pay" rather than "able to do what I want with it". Want support? Download the source and support it you cheap ass pansies.
Or maybe upgrade to an operating system from this century.
17 pounds isn't a notebook, and not a laptop. It's merely a more portable computer.
But c'mon. It weighs as much as 6 of my current laptops. Or as much as my current laptop and a 23" cinema display....
I could add a 1TB firewire hard drive and not go too much over the weight limit. But I'd have to duct tape it all together to make it as "portable".
Too bad port replicators are things of the past. I have one for my laptop and it means when I want to be mobile I've got something that weighs 2.75 pounds, less than an inch thick and runs for 5+ hours on a charge. When I'm not mobile I dock it to a 500GB raid, full size keyboard and 23" display. Works brilliantly for what I do. I'm sure there's a purpose for this thing, but it seems like a very small niche product.
Besides when people look at my laptop and say "It's so small" I get to respond "Yeah, I'm not compensating for anything." and soak up the laughter of my sharp jest.
Re:I don't support the DCMA, however...
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Where did Hollywood get the obscene amount of money used to enact and retain the DMCA? Oh right, from us.
Either we ('mercians) really do like the DMCA or we're hypocrites.
I don't support the DCMA, however...
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This is just obvious. In fact this is what the DCMA intended to do. Just like other laws put hitmen (mostly) out of business and Coke had to stop putting coke in the Coke.
My question is, if this is such a big deal, what are you doing about it? If every person who was pissed off about this gave $100 to a lobby to fight it, we'd have it overturned by next week. Imagine the political power that could be brought against the MPAA/RIAA if we took our DVD/CD money and spent it on lobbyists...
(voting and writing to representatives is for wimps)
And by "wheelwright" I mean someone who's training was made obsolete by technology
First, pick something else you're interested in and use this as a focus for your studies, because the technologies you mention are almost random. If you don't have a reason for doing what you do other than "this stuff is cool" you're never going to learn anything. Like games? Start making games. Like online communities? Make one of those. Whatever, but you've got to have a direction.
Next you need to learn more meta-technology than actual technology. Any specifics you learn now will be obsolete soon enough. Learn enough of the generalities (What programming is, how a markup language works, file systems, databases, etc.) How to do that? Well, ironically you need to learn a specific programing language. Pick one. Everyone here has given a million suggestions, but it doesn't matter. But do take a couple college level courses.
But beyond those courses don't try to get a degree, at least if you have some personal motivation and discipline. Take that money you'd spend on college, get some nice equipment and a cheap apartment and get to work. Figure out which of those acronyms you mentioned are most useful to what you like to do and climb inside.
Technology is about problem solving (and patent disputes), so start solving problems. Get in there and apply your knowledge to a problem. If you have trouble, learn something new and apply that. Virtually all of my current skills have come from teaching myself something after being presented with a new problem. What Ilearned in University 15 years ago was obsolete even when I was there. (Schools don't have the money to be competitive in technology)
If you are not willing to learn new things continuously, and are going to complain about your knowledge being obsolete, then IT is a very bad field to get into. If you just want to dick around in technology, find a different career and be an IT hobbyist.
I wouldn't recommend having the hard drive time out, unless you can keep it from spinning up less than once every few days. Spinning up puts a lot more stress on a HD (especially low powered laptop drives) than simply maintaining velocity. Yes, it will use power and create heat, but it will have a failure rate. Be careful using solid state memory (Compact Flash, etc) for any file actions that are going to have a lot of writes/deletes because the failure rate for writing to these devices much much higher than hard drives. Probably better off just turning off all the external ports/devices except for keyboard and network. But definitely turn off the LCD, most laptops get twice the battery life without driving a display.
Otherwise I would get as much ram as you can afford to improve performance, and make sure the ventilation is decent (probably better off leaving the lid open to provide better air flow. Turn the LCD off with a screensaver. If you're still worried about losing power you can still get a UPS. Even one that will only provide 15 minutes of power to a desktop and monitor will provide much longer to a laptop, plus condition your power. (Which I would recommend since your electrical system sounds sounds kinda crappy and would help extend the life of your components.)
Imagine how useful it would be to have an online knowledge base that can easily be updated created by key people within your organization.
Probably written by someone who hasn't thought about it or tried it. In my experience Wiki's have the same fault of most other "management" software. Unless people must use it, it's a waste of time.
It's not typically the software's fault, it's the people. Managers are lazy/busy and resistant to change. Frankly most of them don't have the skill to organize a wiki properly. And the people who have the information to populate the wiki... well, why would they?
Knowledge bases are documentation. Who reads documentation? No one. I regularly spend more time writing documentation than people will ever spend reading it. (But it's in the contract and easy money.) If I'm an average Joe with a question, I'll just email someone. It's faster (for me) and, after the first few times I go through the project's wiki, try to navigate through it and fail to find what I'm after, I'm likely to never use it again. And forget about the people with the actual knowledge actually spending time to dump useful information in the thing. They might, after getting enough emails on the same question, but that's a FAQ list, not worth a wiki.
Three recent projects I've worked near have all had wikis. And each one (Project and wiki) is a huge mess. I'd wager problem is the project manager, thinking the wiki is going to manage the project for them, when what it really does is give them more work. After complaining about the state of the wiki's, a new project they offered me control of the wiki. I said, "OK" and deleted it. A few people complained, but in the end they couldn't use the "Oh, it's in the wiki" as a distracting excuse any more and the project (so far) is closer to budget and time than the others. (Still got that lame PM, but oh well.)
The people who want the wiki's are the same people who love "documenting" code with NaturalDocs. I went through their docs and out of over 500 functions and classes, only three were documented more than "Function: ConvertNumberToDollars (Converts numbers to dollars)". Wow. What a great use of everyone's time and resources that was.
I'm not saying it can't be helpful, it simply magnifies your management's skills--good or bad. And we all know how rampant bad management is...
In what sense are Japanese phones getting more simple? Like this one by au? or this one from DoCoMo?
I live in Tokyo half the year and I'm much more likely to see people video conferencing or using 3D GPS mapping, or using it as a credit card than using the grandpa phone. Of course people hardly talk on the phone in Japan. My Japanese calling plan give me 50 minutes of talk time a month, but unlimited text messages (the most popular plan with my carrier). In hind sight I should have gotten the 10 minutes of talk time plan. My Japanese phone I bought about 6 months ago has TV (with DVR) 2mp camera with "flash", full featured GPS (integrated with train schedules, etc), miniSD, barcode reader, music service, Java and Flash player, English and Japanese dictionaries and a bunch of features I've never bothered translating. All for about half of what I paid for my craptacular Razr. I never did figure out how to do half the crap on my Razr, but I can use most of the features of my phone in Japan (In a language I, for the most part, can't read) because they designed and engineered it well. I'd be happy with an American phone that just made calls, however I'm sure someone would screw up the UI to even make that stupid.
To stay on topic...
It's a shame that a company is trying to make money by increasing noise to signal when everyone knows the money is in the signal, not the noise. (Ask Google.) Maybe they're going to make money by charging people to not have access totheir crap.
I'm going to get modded down as "redundant" but this whole thing feels like such an overwhelmingly bad idea I can't think straight.
1) To answer you question: Trek makes one that doesn't require external drivers. But it's only up to 512k and USB 1.1, and I can't find any indication to see if it actually encrypts the info. (My bet: no)
2) What kind of "security analyst for a 10 billion dollar bank" are you, and can you be put in a room with the rest of us who are answering this question that we might have a chance to kill you, take your salary and put an untrained monkey in your job?
3) Or are you just being clever and trolling for answers to a stupid idea your VP had?
If it's the last one:
Why Biometric? Biometrics are awful security. Terrible terrible terrible. The only advantage they have is, when it actually works, it works and a person doesn't have to think about it. And that's one of it's problems: People should be thinking about security. After that, it's less reliable than passwords (which have a 100% pass/fail reliability) and the whole issue of not being able to change your biometrics. If someone figures out how to fake my thumb, my whole life is fucking over. I can't get new thumbs. (or a new face or whatever). And the other stuff that's been talked about ad nauseam.
Biometric thumb drives are even worse because it anyone who wants what's "protected" on it just has to steal the thing. Given physical access to the device, it's trivial to circumvent the biometrics.
What information at individual branches is important that needs to be backed up? And why the hell isn't it being done already, and off site? Seriously. You're a "10 billion dollar bank" You should have private data lines between your branches and central computers.
And lastly, under what circumstances would you want backups done by unskilled people? I mean C'mon. Are you telling me that you don't know that these guys are the weakest link in your security anyway?
A better security idea would be to automate your backups through your private lines and disable all access to removable media drives in your whole company. Why you'd allow someone to be able to connect a USB drive to a computer that has access to information that needs to be protected makes my nerve endings hurt.
With only these two data points (16.5 sec in 2004 and 28.6 in 2006) we can get 400+ seconds by the year 2018. While two years behind the 2016 date, is probably ahead of schedule if I know anything about building schedules.
Movies have let me down. I was supposed to be flying around Mars on my Mr. Fusion powered space car 15 years ago.
Time to get a job with the Feds. They can't possibly have enough people on staff to respond to/enforce all of these laws. Just think how many people it takes to go through those tens of millions of phone calls from the hundreds of thousands of terrorists in the US.
Seriously though, it's a shame they'd override the states rights. The only reason most data thefts see the light of day nationally is a California law that makes them do it. If you live in California, the company is required to notify the effected people that their data was mishandled.
If they want to encourage tighter security, seems like bad PR for a whole company is at least as effective as sending some dork to Federal PMITA prison.
I haven't looked up the numbers but I'd bet the penalty for having a stolen database would be worse than actually stealing one.
Why in the hell would you want to do this. Technology is there to serve us, not the other way around, you moron. If I have to "learn" it, it's the number one indication that it needs more development.
Quit wasting your time trying to learn how to speak computer and spend it making the computer understand human.
(And yes, the fastest way to communicate with a computer currently is QWERTY)
If it supports double the bandwidth, doesn't that only support 50% larger displays?
In which case it's already almost obsolete, given I can't even run my 23" at full resolution within legal DVI specs. This would barely run Apple's existing 30" display.
Guess we know at least one reason Apple didn't sign on.
When I was in school I had to do research for papers by my self.
But then again, we had Gopher, not Google, so I'll shut up.
Anyway, off the top of my head, Democracy player is a combination video player, RSS reader and torrent client that hooks up a community of legal (well, most of it) video distribution.
It was also announced this week that Steven Soderbergh will be releasing a short through BitTorrent. (I'll let you find the link, you hard working student.)
I'll see that. I worked as a contractor for so long that I generally got jobs on word of mouth. Since then I've proceeded to start my own companies, so I wouldn't know what the hell I'd put on a resume now. And unless there's a good reason, I hire contractors exclusively. We have less bullshit between us and we understand each other's goals.
From what I can tell of how people look for jobs, I can't believe anyone ever gets one!
It makes me sad to see how pathetic people are about looking for jobs. The only people who should be like this are people who have nothing to offer! (oh, wait...)
Take it from an employer: We want to hire you! Often as badly (or worse) than you want the job! If you come to us with this crappy "oh please hire me, I'm desperate and scared" attitude, 1) We won't want to hire you (unless we have an opening for sycophant) and 2) If we do hire you, we'll treat you just like you're expecting.
Here's a better approach: Treat the employer like you have something they want. They'll treat you with more respect.
If your employer would fire you for looking for another job, you are better off without them.
(And if an employer would fire someone just for looking, they are probably glad to be rid of you. I'd never treat someone who works for me like that. I'd ask them if they were unhappy, and if there was some way I could make it worth their while. Of course I also fire people if they're not worth my while.)
Point 1) You're in high school. Sorry. It happens to the best of us, but nothing you learn there is appropriate for the real world.
Point 2) Virtually all schools are out of date. When I was in university I was taught Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, and Motorola assembly even though C was the prevailing language in the real world. (I had to start a student organization where we taught ourselves C).
Point 3) There are plenty of Java jobs out there and will still be when you get out in the real world.
Point 4) No programmer worth their weight knows only one language. In the past 15 years I've been paid to program in 14 different languages.
Pay attention to the "Java is just a tool" posts around this thread. There be some wisdom to take forward. The license is not what is saving or hurting Java (98% of open source projects are crap. Jump on a random like at SourceForge and look) It's that Java never lived up to its initial promises and has been crippled by trying to hit a moving target ever since. It still has good uses, but Sun doesn't know what they are.
They should have called it "Parallel Refrigerator".
Japanese can't say "Playstation" and we all know how much that hurt sales.
I know Wii is an awful name, but all of this "It can't possibly be true and I'm going to make up reasons why..." stuff is just sad. Why a "real" news site is wasting even editorial space for it is stupid. Save it for Penny Arcade. They'll do a better job.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not motivated enough to type "freelance programing" into Google or search Craigslist, you're not cut out for "off hours" contract work. You even say yourself you're not good at self motivation. Do you think your client is going to call you at 11:00 pm to keep you motivated?
A good contractor is self motivated and can produce quality work without having someone getting in their hair all day. They also have more availability than "after hours". Are you ready/able to handle client communication during your business day? When the contract project goes into crunch time, are you willing to let your day job suffer? Or give your part time job the finger? Are you familiar with the 1040 form and the schedule C?
If you are not fully committed to it, please do the rest of us a favor and don't bother. We don't need the bad rep. But if you are, go out there and take a big bite, and we're glad to have you, it can be very fun and rewarding.
I remember doing this back in high school on Atari 400's. Let's just say programing for speed on a membrane keyboard was the biggest challenge of the competition.
I guess they mean "Possibly" in the sense that they're just being pretentious.
- Music CD's: Spindle in the closet.
- DVD's: Case Logic 320 CD case. (which you can get refill pages for and put in more than 500 easily. See 8 disks on a page removable pages make it easy to keep them organized.)
- Backups, software disks, etc: Spindle in the closet.
- Disks I use regularly (Game CD's for copy protection, PS2 games, etc): 5 inch trigger cases.
I love the trigger cases, keep extra ones on hand to send when clients need CD sent to them. Paper sleeves don't protect in the mail, and jewel cases get broken too easily.You say you got a "Fair" salary, but clearly you didn't because you feel screwed. You should have asked for more up front.
A start ups, especially web start ups, really only need talented people up front, then they have to get rid of them. Same reason you don't pay carpenters to come back to the house after they finish building it. That's the nature of the startup.
I'll echo what everyone else said.
Either you need to get into the company before they have employees (in which case you'll likely get burned much more severely, but with better reward possibilities) or get there later, after they've shed their builders.
Please, no, not fingerprints. Sure, you can't loose them, but you can't change them. How is that secure? Just because it's hard to break it today doesn't mean it won't be trivial tomorrow. See Bic pen vs Kryptonite Locks) Since we're dealing with physical access, it's impossible to determine when that day will come. (Unlike passwords where you can use pretty basic math to figure out how long it will take to brute force it.)
If someone manages to steal or forge my finger prints, my life is over. I can't ever have access to anything secure again. (If everything was secured with my fingerprint that is.)
On my systems we have three strikes and out. You get three chances to enter the correct password. After that it locks you out. Either you know the password or you need to go through the recovery process (which involves a timed lockout and a catchpa). We don't put too many restrictions on the content of the passwords, and we have very few recoveries. And so far, no unauthorized access. That we know of.
"Security" is a feeling, not a state.
I've worked with a lot of people producing 3d environments over the years (Since 1996). Several projects called themselves "Web 2.0" but I guess that name finally stuck with an even more hyped technology.
The problems are:
1) Speed: It's slower than a web page. Always will be.
2) Unscanable: If I want to scroll through a web page I scroll through it. If I'm in a virtual environment there can be stuff on the "page" that's behind other stuff. Great for metaphor, but bad for someone trying to find something.
3) Difficult navigation: We have mouses. A mouse with a scroll wheel gives three dimensions of translation (move forward, sideways, and vertically). However to navigate a 3d space you need to add at least two axis of rotation (heading and pitch). Sure you can do that with holding mouse buttons, but it's counter intuitive and awkward. Would you like it if you had to hold the right mouse button down to move your mouse up and down? 4) Content creation is too hard. Sure 3d tools have gotten better, but compare the effort, knowledge and skill required to build a basic web page with building a 3d room. Even using notepad vs a full featured 3d application, notepad wins.
5) No content: Text is best in flat form. 2d images are best viewed without distortion. Audio is best heard without accounting for virtual proximity or room acoustics. As for browsing a 3d shop, it's about 100 times easier to photograph it from every angle than to build an accurate, detailed model.
It's all the bitchy responses to something like this that makes me believe people who champion OSS's "free"ness is much more about users wanting something for "free" as in "don't have to pay" rather than "able to do what I want with it". Want support? Download the source and support it you cheap ass pansies.
Or maybe upgrade to an operating system from this century.
But c'mon. It weighs as much as 6 of my current laptops. Or as much as my current laptop and a 23" cinema display....
I could add a 1TB firewire hard drive and not go too much over the weight limit. But I'd have to duct tape it all together to make it as "portable".
Too bad port replicators are things of the past. I have one for my laptop and it means when I want to be mobile I've got something that weighs 2.75 pounds, less than an inch thick and runs for 5+ hours on a charge. When I'm not mobile I dock it to a 500GB raid, full size keyboard and 23" display. Works brilliantly for what I do. I'm sure there's a purpose for this thing, but it seems like a very small niche product.
Besides when people look at my laptop and say "It's so small" I get to respond "Yeah, I'm not compensating for anything." and soak up the laughter of my sharp jest.
Either we ('mercians) really do like the DMCA or we're hypocrites.
My question is, if this is such a big deal, what are you doing about it? If every person who was pissed off about this gave $100 to a lobby to fight it, we'd have it overturned by next week. Imagine the political power that could be brought against the MPAA/RIAA if we took our DVD/CD money and spent it on lobbyists...
(voting and writing to representatives is for wimps)
Not even worth the effort for a "feh".
And by "wheelwright" I mean someone who's training was made obsolete by technology
First, pick something else you're interested in and use this as a focus for your studies, because the technologies you mention are almost random. If you don't have a reason for doing what you do other than "this stuff is cool" you're never going to learn anything. Like games? Start making games. Like online communities? Make one of those. Whatever, but you've got to have a direction.
Next you need to learn more meta-technology than actual technology. Any specifics you learn now will be obsolete soon enough. Learn enough of the generalities (What programming is, how a markup language works, file systems, databases, etc.) How to do that? Well, ironically you need to learn a specific programing language. Pick one. Everyone here has given a million suggestions, but it doesn't matter. But do take a couple college level courses.
But beyond those courses don't try to get a degree, at least if you have some personal motivation and discipline. Take that money you'd spend on college, get some nice equipment and a cheap apartment and get to work. Figure out which of those acronyms you mentioned are most useful to what you like to do and climb inside.
Technology is about problem solving (and patent disputes), so start solving problems. Get in there and apply your knowledge to a problem. If you have trouble, learn something new and apply that. Virtually all of my current skills have come from teaching myself something after being presented with a new problem. What Ilearned in University 15 years ago was obsolete even when I was there. (Schools don't have the money to be competitive in technology)
If you are not willing to learn new things continuously, and are going to complain about your knowledge being obsolete, then IT is a very bad field to get into. If you just want to dick around in technology, find a different career and be an IT hobbyist.
Cheapskate.
Otherwise I would get as much ram as you can afford to improve performance, and make sure the ventilation is decent (probably better off leaving the lid open to provide better air flow. Turn the LCD off with a screensaver. If you're still worried about losing power you can still get a UPS. Even one that will only provide 15 minutes of power to a desktop and monitor will provide much longer to a laptop, plus condition your power. (Which I would recommend since your electrical system sounds sounds kinda crappy and would help extend the life of your components.)
It's not typically the software's fault, it's the people. Managers are lazy/busy and resistant to change. Frankly most of them don't have the skill to organize a wiki properly. And the people who have the information to populate the wiki... well, why would they?
Knowledge bases are documentation. Who reads documentation? No one. I regularly spend more time writing documentation than people will ever spend reading it. (But it's in the contract and easy money.) If I'm an average Joe with a question, I'll just email someone. It's faster (for me) and, after the first few times I go through the project's wiki, try to navigate through it and fail to find what I'm after, I'm likely to never use it again. And forget about the people with the actual knowledge actually spending time to dump useful information in the thing. They might, after getting enough emails on the same question, but that's a FAQ list, not worth a wiki.
Three recent projects I've worked near have all had wikis. And each one (Project and wiki) is a huge mess. I'd wager problem is the project manager, thinking the wiki is going to manage the project for them, when what it really does is give them more work. After complaining about the state of the wiki's, a new project they offered me control of the wiki. I said, "OK" and deleted it. A few people complained, but in the end they couldn't use the "Oh, it's in the wiki" as a distracting excuse any more and the project (so far) is closer to budget and time than the others. (Still got that lame PM, but oh well.)
The people who want the wiki's are the same people who love "documenting" code with NaturalDocs. I went through their docs and out of over 500 functions and classes, only three were documented more than "Function: ConvertNumberToDollars (Converts numbers to dollars)". Wow. What a great use of everyone's time and resources that was.
I'm not saying it can't be helpful, it simply magnifies your management's skills--good or bad. And we all know how rampant bad management is...
I live in Tokyo half the year and I'm much more likely to see people video conferencing or using 3D GPS mapping, or using it as a credit card than using the grandpa phone. Of course people hardly talk on the phone in Japan. My Japanese calling plan give me 50 minutes of talk time a month, but unlimited text messages (the most popular plan with my carrier). In hind sight I should have gotten the 10 minutes of talk time plan. My Japanese phone I bought about 6 months ago has TV (with DVR) 2mp camera with "flash", full featured GPS (integrated with train schedules, etc), miniSD, barcode reader, music service, Java and Flash player, English and Japanese dictionaries and a bunch of features I've never bothered translating. All for about half of what I paid for my craptacular Razr. I never did figure out how to do half the crap on my Razr, but I can use most of the features of my phone in Japan (In a language I, for the most part, can't read) because they designed and engineered it well. I'd be happy with an American phone that just made calls, however I'm sure someone would screw up the UI to even make that stupid.
To stay on topic...
It's a shame that a company is trying to make money by increasing noise to signal when everyone knows the money is in the signal, not the noise. (Ask Google.) Maybe they're going to make money by charging people to not have access totheir crap.
1) To answer you question: Trek makes one that doesn't require external drivers. But it's only up to 512k and USB 1.1, and I can't find any indication to see if it actually encrypts the info. (My bet: no)
2) What kind of "security analyst for a 10 billion dollar bank" are you, and can you be put in a room with the rest of us who are answering this question that we might have a chance to kill you, take your salary and put an untrained monkey in your job?
3) Or are you just being clever and trolling for answers to a stupid idea your VP had?
If it's the last one:
Why Biometric? Biometrics are awful security. Terrible terrible terrible. The only advantage they have is, when it actually works, it works and a person doesn't have to think about it. And that's one of it's problems: People should be thinking about security. After that, it's less reliable than passwords (which have a 100% pass/fail reliability) and the whole issue of not being able to change your biometrics. If someone figures out how to fake my thumb, my whole life is fucking over. I can't get new thumbs. (or a new face or whatever). And the other stuff that's been talked about ad nauseam.
Biometric thumb drives are even worse because it anyone who wants what's "protected" on it just has to steal the thing. Given physical access to the device, it's trivial to circumvent the biometrics.
What information at individual branches is important that needs to be backed up? And why the hell isn't it being done already, and off site? Seriously. You're a "10 billion dollar bank" You should have private data lines between your branches and central computers.
And lastly, under what circumstances would you want backups done by unskilled people? I mean C'mon. Are you telling me that you don't know that these guys are the weakest link in your security anyway?
A better security idea would be to automate your backups through your private lines and disable all access to removable media drives in your whole company. Why you'd allow someone to be able to connect a USB drive to a computer that has access to information that needs to be protected makes my nerve endings hurt.
Movies have let me down. I was supposed to be flying around Mars on my Mr. Fusion powered space car 15 years ago.
Seriously though, it's a shame they'd override the states rights. The only reason most data thefts see the light of day nationally is a California law that makes them do it. If you live in California, the company is required to notify the effected people that their data was mishandled.
If they want to encourage tighter security, seems like bad PR for a whole company is at least as effective as sending some dork to Federal PMITA prison.
I haven't looked up the numbers but I'd bet the penalty for having a stolen database would be worse than actually stealing one.
Quit wasting your time trying to learn how to speak computer and spend it making the computer understand human.
(And yes, the fastest way to communicate with a computer currently is QWERTY)
In which case it's already almost obsolete, given I can't even run my 23" at full resolution within legal DVI specs. This would barely run Apple's existing 30" display.
Guess we know at least one reason Apple didn't sign on.
But then again, we had Gopher, not Google, so I'll shut up.
Anyway, off the top of my head, Democracy player is a combination video player, RSS reader and torrent client that hooks up a community of legal (well, most of it) video distribution.
It was also announced this week that Steven Soderbergh will be releasing a short through BitTorrent. (I'll let you find the link, you hard working student.)
I'll see that. I worked as a contractor for so long that I generally got jobs on word of mouth. Since then I've proceeded to start my own companies, so I wouldn't know what the hell I'd put on a resume now. And unless there's a good reason, I hire contractors exclusively. We have less bullshit between us and we understand each other's goals.
From what I can tell of how people look for jobs, I can't believe anyone ever gets one!
It makes me sad to see how pathetic people are about looking for jobs. The only people who should be like this are people who have nothing to offer! (oh, wait...)
Take it from an employer: We want to hire you! Often as badly (or worse) than you want the job! If you come to us with this crappy "oh please hire me, I'm desperate and scared" attitude, 1) We won't want to hire you (unless we have an opening for sycophant) and 2) If we do hire you, we'll treat you just like you're expecting.
Here's a better approach: Treat the employer like you have something they want. They'll treat you with more respect.
If your employer would fire you for looking for another job, you are better off without them.
(And if an employer would fire someone just for looking, they are probably glad to be rid of you. I'd never treat someone who works for me like that. I'd ask them if they were unhappy, and if there was some way I could make it worth their while. Of course I also fire people if they're not worth my while.)
Point 2) Virtually all schools are out of date. When I was in university I was taught Pascal, COBOL, FORTRAN, and Motorola assembly even though C was the prevailing language in the real world. (I had to start a student organization where we taught ourselves C).
Point 3) There are plenty of Java jobs out there and will still be when you get out in the real world.
Point 4) No programmer worth their weight knows only one language. In the past 15 years I've been paid to program in 14 different languages.
Pay attention to the "Java is just a tool" posts around this thread. There be some wisdom to take forward. The license is not what is saving or hurting Java (98% of open source projects are crap. Jump on a random like at SourceForge and look) It's that Java never lived up to its initial promises and has been crippled by trying to hit a moving target ever since. It still has good uses, but Sun doesn't know what they are.
Japanese can't say "Playstation" and we all know how much that hurt sales.
I know Wii is an awful name, but all of this "It can't possibly be true and I'm going to make up reasons why..." stuff is just sad. Why a "real" news site is wasting even editorial space for it is stupid. Save it for Penny Arcade. They'll do a better job.