caw

Laptops are more expensive than desktops, assuming you buy a business laptop with the normal enterprise features. They also take more abuse and need replaced a lot. However, companies reap the benefit in allow you to take work home with you (you work more), and in that you can be placed anywhere in an office and still productive.

I actually don't do any of my work locally, except for office stuff (mails, docs, ppt). All of my real work is on a server with big beefy hardware and enterprise level SLAs. I can reboot my laptop all day long for security patches and not interrupt my most important work. All of the laptops have SSDs (albeit with full disk encryption). No it's not a thin client, it's a full Windows install.

I don't like how the swiping changed. Swiping right on emails and SMS used to bring up the delete. Now it's swipe left :(

A company I know of just went to unassigned cubes. Cubes are first come first serve each day, and as a result of that you can't store things overnight in the cube. Besides real estate savings for the company, I suppose it makes the firing process quicker.

I've been running CCCP for years (I think at least 5 or so), on multiple computers, and have never had issues with CCCP. The only reason I have to update is for codec features, like hi10p.

I agree with your comment on licensing. I haven't ever looked into CCCP's reuse of codecs.

Where I live in the US I'm at 30% post-tax. I could probably get this down to about 20%, but I'd be adding on an hour or more of commute each way, and I'm in a pretty desirable part of the city.

> it's often faster to just throw your hands up and work from the parity disk until you can diagnose the issue.

One of the advantages of enterprise drives is how long the drive spends error checking. Consumer drives spend considerably longer when it detects an error, and that can cause the RAID controller to drop the drive as malfunctioning. Then it has to rebuild the array or operate on hot spare.

There used to be a firmware setting you could toggle on the WD Caviar Black drives to effectively turn them into the RE (enterprise) drives. They've since made some design changes so that's no longer possible.

A coworker of mine at a previous job had an office (shared), but it was next to the break room on the floor. People would frequently walk by for coffee. I thought the microwaves (smell and beeping) would have been the most annoying in that office.

Since you're current in college, you can actually use that to your advantage with certain people. You can now reliably cold call certain people all by saying "Hi $COLLEGE alumni! I'm currently in $COLLEGE" and people will talk to you. I'm sure there's a lot of people still local around the school. How do you find the people? LinkedIn or through your college, they always have things to connect with alumni.

You can then ask 'if they will warm-intro you to business owners who fit the general profile of "People who could conceivably write very small [+] checks."'

> First, you need to teach to the level per activity.

This can be accomplished.

Imagine you have a set of similar students by age, say Kindergarten - 2nd grade. Imagine that you have 4 classrooms and 4 teachers, each with a particular subject (math, science, reading/writing, geography/history). Each teacher teaches the same subject at multiple levels. Then you just send the student to the skill appropriate class.

If you were to take classes above your age determined grade, it'd basically be like skipping a grade. If you're at your age level for learning, there's no difference. But for everyone in between they get a mix of more advanced learning where they need it.

I may or may not have had first hand experience with this model

In the US, credits are typically by "Credit hours", which I believe is in reference to how much instruction time you have per week. A 3 credit hour class may meet 3x a week for 1 hour, or 2x a week for 1.5hr. So saying 30 credits is the same as saying 30 credit hours, which is 30 "hours" of course work. Wall clock time is higher because you have homework and other stuff, and of course a 3 hour class goes on for at least 12 weeks of instruction.

Isn't that the same as ls -1?

I'm not entirely sure what you're spending your time on from this, but what are they asking for? Try to get the other person to do as much work as possible, so you can minimize the amount of time you're spending on it.

I'd also agree with either charging money or passing them off to someone else. I'd mostly go with #2 since you want your time (You sad "at least 75% [towards your] own projects")

My first internship offered a 401k with company match. The trick for that is to put in exactly as much to get the company "free" money. If they match 100% up to the first 3% of your salary, you just got a 3% raise so long as you agree to put your money in a 401k. If you ever leave, then you'll just roll the account over. Not all of that money could be yours (read the vesting rules), but a good chunk of it probably will be. At worst, did you miss 3% of your salary? You'll get it back in 40 years.

After that point, you're going to get wildly different ideas of how to save your money. Most commonly people will suggest high risk, high return assets (stocks or stock funds, as opposed to bonds or bond-based mutual funds), since even if you lose everything, then you still have the rest of your life ahead of you. Basically what it comes down to is how to compound your earnings combined with the tax burden. Each of these have different rules as to maximum contributions per year, when you can take your money out, etc.

* Traditional 401k or IRA - Pre tax money, lowers your income taxes now in favor of paying tax later (you suspect your tax rate will decrease -- probably not true as a student)

* Roth 401k or IRA - Post tax money. Pay tax now, and none later (you suspect your taxes will go up)

* Brokerage accounts - Pay taxes on gains as income or capital gains (most tax, most liquidity).

Within each of these you can choose how to invest your money for your risk/reward tolerance. Bonds, Funds, and Stocks are how most people invest. Some choose to do real estate. Some choose to do more riskier things like derivatives. Wikipedia has a full list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_market).

So long as you diversify, you should get an overall good return and won't be subject to volatility in one particular investment. However, due to minimum investments for the first few years it's probably best to diversify over time, rather than right from the beginning.

I graduated 2 years ago, so I've had to brush up on all of this stuff, along with supplemental benefits like AD&D, life insurance, etc. If you have any questions my email is in my profile.

I haven't checked out Arch's wiki, but the FreeBSD handbook is a similar thing. It's so well documented I use it to compensate for other documentation.

The humor is why I also browse Slashdot, even though they're generally late (like by days) with the submissions. There's a little bit of serious discussion, a lot of memes, but then some generally humorous discussions based off misinterpretations of comments, articles, and titles.

And then realize that your school's course catalog prohibits computerized queries against its server, and then you're blocked from actual registration. It happened to several students at my school before the school came out with an official one. Make sure to read the rules!

There's some course creators already available for different schools. Here's one of them, https://courseoff.com/, but you can just google around.

Basically what they do is you add the classes you need to take, and then visually select sections to optimize your schedule.

I found this to be true as well. If you're coming in through the resume route, yes you'll be judged on GPA. My co-op job had a particular emphasis on GPA since we were a branch of the school, hired loads of co-ops from the school (lots of datapoints), had permanent hires from the school, and had enough people familiar with the courses in each subject to tell what the course was like.

If you're not going for that sort of job, then all you need is the GPA threshold, and no one is going to care afterwards. Get out of the square root club if you're there and pull up your GPA to where your target job wants it. So if their filter cutoff is 3.5, get a 3.51 and call it a day. If your target job cuts off at 3.0 then really that's all you need to get. It could reduce your stress level (not sure how bad UW is), and let you do other things that would help your chances of getting a job more (clubs, leadership positions, volunteering, networking, etc). Some people split up their GPA between "core GPA" and "cumulative GPA", which could help if you're doing bad in your chem classes but passing all your CS classes.

I'd add

- Locking pins for windows, if you don't mind drilling them out (Check your warranty if you have new windows). Someone I know had their house broken into by just using a pry-bar on the window. It snapped the (15 year old) window lock and locking pin. If you have them, check to make sure they're in good condition.

The point about trimming foliage is true, but some people are brazen/stupid enough to go in the front window at like 3pm in the afternoon in clear view of the street (what happened to the people I know).

- Switch to keyed locks where there's glass nearby. A lot of exterior doors have glass, and if you smash the glass you can reach in and turn the lock. A keyed lock on the inside will stop that. You could also exchange your window locks for keyed window locks if you really want to, but the locking pins should be fine to deter most people.

My work has a similar model. They're quite nice, and I've gradually been working on how much I'm standing - up to about 2 hours now.

As far as power goes, my desk has a hidden power strip on the underside. It powers the lift feature for both legs (so there's only 1 wall plug), but you can also plug in your monitors so you don't need to have 10' cords on all your equipment. They also sell a power strip that can mount to the top of the desk, so again you don't need very long cords for all your peripherals (phones, chargers, etc).

For network cables you'll still need a cord long enough to travel to the standing height.

> A "portfolio" does not have to, and should not, consist of side projects.

I agree with this

> If you have absolutely nothing that you can share (code, screenshots, a URL, a "case study") with a prospective employer, it's not the prospective employer that has a problem.

I disagree with this. If you require this to be true, you've instantly excluded everyone's experience in either government (particularly defense), or industry when you work on internal services. There's a huge number of enterprise developers at my current company who will never be able to show you their work because they're all internal applications. Maybe a "case study" would work, but you have to be real careful of not to cover anything that doesn't fall into the trade secret category.

I'm pretty sure there's some more objective measures, like mile run times. There's charts for how long it should take you. There should be some more standard benchmarks for other activities.

I'd also like to suggest it's possible to be "mildly out of shape" and active. For example, if he was "out of shape" and recently started working out.

On the subjective lines, it's possible to be out of shape for certain activities due to the musculature you've built for the activities you do frequently. If all you do is bench weights, you'd be out of shape when you go to run a mile.

I'm like 8-10% body fat if I calculate it (electronic things say about 13%), would you consider me "in shape"? I wouldn't, not in any sort of normal means (running, lifting weights, whatever else).

If you assume your market rate, you can figure out how much money you would have drawn as a salary (since it's unpaid), and consider that as an investment. Compare that to the 80k he's put in, and maybe that will help settle the numbers.

Heh, if I sound like that it's because I'm disillusioned with my experiences.

You can totally fix internal communications, but the employees have to own it. If the employees don't feel the desire to share the knowledge, it will never get done.

Sufficient management push could get stuff done. But I've got an internal knowledge management tool as well (fully ITIL compliant!), and from the emails there's a bunch of people who will avoid the tool or make low quality knowledge articles.

Why not integrate with Outlook? That would be pretty badass, because as soon as someone wrote a plugin for Outlook with our ticket management system I dropped in like 3x as many tickets as I used to.

Yes you've correctly identified a problem. It's sad that I have to "know a guy" to sometimes get stuff done.

Unfortunately, no one with purchasing power cares.

You can try promoting "social" and "collaboration", and you might get some sales out of that since those buzzwords are hot. However, you won't fundamentally change anything because ultimately someone bought your software to fluff up their annual review, and then it gets dropped like a hot rock after the coast is clear.

You're probably better off with IT self-service, it's a hot enterprise area right now.

I'd go for it if the team is good. With 20 senior people, that's a lot of possible mentors and people to learn stuff from. The money is obviously good, and it's the thing you want to be working on.

You can evangelize once you're there. Or, you'll find out that what they're doing is actually best for the environment they have. I seem to remember SVN handles larger repos better.

Don't work about being "junior." I joined my employer as new college graduate, and still was able to influence some changes in my environment. However, I still use RCS for some scenarios because it works best in my environment.

Not sure of a library that would let you do it, but maybe a mail server with rules that would get triggered on mail receive. Pretty sure you can run custom scripts on a postfix server based on email content.

Some places like Newegg put the promo code on the item page itself, so it's basically like giving it to everyone who buys the item. In this case, there's no loss on the sale.

I agree. Last minute 3 day vacations is actually OK around my workplace, and we have a limited number of vacation days.

First you ask yourself if you have critical work to do those days. If not, you're good. Otherwise, you may have to get it done sooner. Then you ask your coworker if they're going to be around to cover for you. If they are, cool, you've just scheduled yourself out of office. Set up your OOO notification and update your calendar. If not, check with your manager to make sure it's ok for both of you to be out. Generally this may mean a concession that you have to carry your laptop or phone in case stuff goes down. Congratulations, you've now scheduled your vacation.

The only time our manager really gets involved is during Nov/Dec for the holidays when people run into "use it or lose it", so he'll informally let us carry over to January or so, just so that everyone isn't rushing to take at the same time and leaving us without anyone in the office. The other time is when you want to take multiweek vacations, just so he's aware and can get coverage information.

Even then, half the company is in the same situation so it's normally pretty dead in Dec.

Tuesday does solve the 3 day weekend problem. What do you do if Monday is a holiday? Trade on Monday morning and meet up outside of work, or just hold it till Tuesday. Most of the time we just hold it.

The reason for this discussion is because up until a certain seniority level, you get "hazard pay" for carrying the pager. You get paid 1 hour for every so many you're on call. A weekend/holiday is 24 hours instead of 8 on the day your receive it or 16 on a weekday.

You should also cover rules for holding the pager. Ours include no alcohol, and no more than 1 hour away from the site (certain emergencies may require on-site visits). You also need to respond within 20 minutes, otherwise it gets escalated, or in certain larger locations, sent to the backup on-call person.