thismat

All very good points indeed.

I've been working for this person for over three years with side-business, we have a solid understanding of each other and I understand their brands and projects because of this. I also know that the work is steady enough that the company is still going and growing after those three years.

The scope of work luckily is an ongoing thing, basically the position is technical lead for one of their largest clients and also technical lead on a lot of new business as well.

I'll admit, there is a large degree of impulse in my decision here (turned in resignation today ack!), but also I've been working towards this goal for years now and have built a solid relationship and understanding with them, if nothing else it will be a lot of new and exciting experience and I think the next logical step in my career. I just can't see myself moving any further/faster with my current company.

There is always a contract though (I have one with them right now already for the projects I'm working on).

We'll see how it goes, hopefully it turns out alright and I won't have to go out in search of another job in the near future haha!

Thanks for your input, very well thought out.

Thanks, and yes, I am looking for some kind of hidden gotcha, because it sounds a little too good to be true. Maybe I'm just skeptical as it will be my first job outside of a corporation in this field.

Thanks for the input, the lack of face-time I can handle, right now my "peers" at work are all uninterested COBOL programmers aside from the one other .NET guy, so I won't be missing much haah.

That's it, I'm throwing away my G1...this whole time I thought it was a server.

When you consider that not only do these systems run a lot of batch processing daily, they also have user interfaces through things like CICS, which users are allowed to login and initiate jobs. Most of the time it has it's own form of concurrency in which it will lock certain datasets for processing and release them when it's done. Of course, it's still possible to get deadlocks and other issues because of this.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending it. It frustrates me on a daily basis, especially without having a relational database for some critical information.

In my experience, the reasons are mostly just because it's been the standard for so long at said shop.

Most people using mainframes don't make money off of their IT department, their programmers are expensive and don't produce profits. Investing in a large change from "what works and has a fixed cost" to something new and possibly troublesome or more expensive (initial cost) just isn't a priority for them.

Not to mention the retraining you'd have to do. A lot of these programmers are either old and unwilling to learn, or just uninterested in rocking the boat. So is it worth it to have to fire people or get subpar code, or just stick with what's working that keeps you generating a profit and keeps your current programmers job security?

Some people still refuse to invest in DB2 though, and so you're stuck with VSAM/Flatfiles for your data. It's a horrible time sink.

Right, and incredibly high speeds is definitely accurate. I can't remember the amount of instructions/second our mainframe can handle, but I remember it being in the multiple hundreds of thousands.

A friend of mine always says "Your code should explain what it does, comments should explain why.". I agree with with you and him completely.

I wanted to open some dialog with you about this, but I believe your email address might be incorrect or there was an issue with how I converted it that I can't find. Care to send me a message?

I can't help but feel a tinge of enlightenment from reading his articles. Maybe not enlightenment, maybe....reinforcement. Thank you so much for posting this link.

To add to this: The reason the text-indent trick is used was normally for header replacement, navigation replacement, et cetera, and was a method of providing strong naming that didn't clutter markup and fed screen readers or CSS disabled browsers.

Also to expand on it a little more, I use(ed) this trick a lot, and I've never had the image shifted off the page. I'd be interested to see the HTML that actually broke.

This is exactly right. It's an old marketing trick, plays into your initial reaction with the price tag. And often times people will round it down instead of up, so $99.99 will be $99 dollars, saying "Man, I got this awesome painting for my wall, it was only $99" sounds more appealing than "Man, I got this awesome painting for my wall, it was only a hundred bucks".

As a G1 owner (which I do love), I would love to get my hands on an HTC Hero and hack it to work on T-Mobile....I've never wanted to switch carriers until I was disappointed with the MyTouch (forgot the HTC hardware it runs on). I think T-Mobile could of done so much better by bringing in the slightly higher priced HTC Hero and kept the G1 as their entry level model.

On a similar note, let's not forget the amount of corporations that run Windows XP because it's the most ideal solution for their software. I don't know about most other corporations, but our company doesn't readily run out to buy every new version of anything, no, we're normally upgrading every other version.

On that note, we're probably going to be upgrading to windows 7 eventually, though not until a machine is out of warranty I wouldn't think.

And I've used both every day for years. I don't cringe moving from OSX to Windows 7 and back (even XP isn't that bad, just less fun). In fact, I don't even blink an eyelash over it.

I hear ya, and yeah I've seen the issues related to the Macs on the forums, though I think they've come a long ways in the recent months.

On that note, the OCZ forums are awesome, that company deserves heaps of praise for it's communication with the community. Developers are constantly releasing beta firmware and pre-release (fresh builds) there.

I have an OCZ SSD in my desktop machine and I can agree with you, the biggest noticeable difference to me is in moving and deleting large files.

I can't remember the last time I had to wait on a file to do the whole moving/copying/deleting dialog.

I think the Vertex is the one I put in my desktop machine. Absolutely love it. Need to upgrade my MBP to an SSD in the near future.

I'm still pretty wet behind the ears, but looking through Quake source (and quake 2), was quite the experience. I though the code was beautiful, as well as impressed with how DRY everything seemed to be....oh, and variable naming, small things like that, really impressed me.

ahahaha, I'm sure she was happy you ruined her fun as well. Good stuff, I'll check out those games, my 5 year old isn't terribly interested in tic tac toe anymore.

What is your suggestion to replace that? As some careers demand a certain level of competency and skill (Doctors, Nurses, Civil Engineers, et cetera)?

Are you saying the confidence we give doctors based on their years of studying and research just might be too much faith in the Government standard? Interesting question that brings up as well, how do we accurately gauge a persons skill in a profession like this if we were to try to "free" up the institutional thought process? Maybe an apprentice/master system? Seems to work well for skill trades, why not for doctors?

Very informative, I think your take on it, because of your location, leads to a better understanding of the area and the tensions. Helps people like me understand it a little better.

I agree with you that Iran and North Korea definitely don't seem to be a threat against Western Europe, at least not an initial one or immediate one. I was under the impression that the locations for the shields were chosen based on it being able to intercept a multitude of possible strikes against different countries. Obviously the information I've gotten has been minimal and not well researched, which is why I continue to pester you ;).

Given the information you've provided, it seems Obama was indeed making a good decision, that's good news. I am a little curious on what the real threat is already against the US though. It's arrogant to think that we're not being targeted for a large hit, but with the media the way it is it's hard to accurately gauge anything, I tend to err on the side of being overly critical.

Ahh, what puzzle games do you play? Any suggestions from the market?

I can't argue there, I can only hope as the platform matures this changes. They did such a good job with Chrome that I'm left wanting and curious with their mobile browser, at least compared to the iP(hone|odtouch).

Luckily there is also multi touch support on the android SDK I believe as well, so at least we know they have plans to implement it.

It seems we're talking in two different places about the same subject, haha.

I do see your point, and it does seem logical. It definitely would be nice though to remove the threat of any nuclear attack from or against any nation for the foreseeable future. Though I guess a nuclear strike might be less devastating than years of war in the long run huh? What a chilling world we live in.

I see your points, I'm curious though, why does it lead to so much strife with the EU? Why isn't defense considered a peaceful action? Was it the location? Or was it because it made them feel like they didn't have that super power anymore?

I understand it doesn't really reduce any real threat we're facing right now, but what about other nations we would be protecting? The smaller countries who don't have nuclear weapons as a defense option?

These are serious questions, not playing devils advocate here, I'm genuinely interested.

Ah, I see the relation you made there. Makes sense given what was said, but every time I hear someone say: "the war was for oil and revenge!" it's always followed up with: "GWB Jr. is just finishing his daddy's work". That is the revenge I was referring to.

I'm also not saying it was a war based on emotion, but that the high tension and emotion levels obviously had a lot to do with it being acceptable at the time. I'd say it was the American peoples revenge though, not the revenge of GWB.

The browser was definitely updated, I notice most browsing is at least a little snappier, though I'm disappointed with the browsing experience overall on the G1.

Battery life is pretty bad, but I pretty much keep it on a charger all day long now anyway, got used to knowing it's going to need a charge regularly, if I'm out and about for a while I'll use locale and power center to trim it down to only the basic needs.

I mostly just use the standard calendar, mail, messaging, remember the milk and a little irc and twitter. but I'm pretty regularly going in and purging applications with TasKill.

I'm in Fort Worth, you're pretty much a stones throw away from me.