I currently work for a company that has instituted an incredibly restrictive development methodology they bought from a big consulting firm. It requires multiple forms be filled out for every program written, every requirement for every program written, every request for every change to every program or application written. All of these reviewed by coworkers who are not about to alienate team members, and reviewed by lower management who want to look good to upper management by having everything go smoothly.

These documents are then stored on the LAN. To never, or rarely ever, be read again.

The one thing it does not enforce or require, is meaningful documentation in the code itself.

It doubles, or more, the time it takes to do everything. But it does nothing to stop the mistakes any better than the procedures that went before. If anything, it finds less errors, because we were not given more time to do this double or more amount of work. So time is so compressed, we do not have time to do anything other than get it working and get it in.

One thing it does do very well, is prevent problems from getting fixed. The only people that will start a change effort are those that notice a problem and are affected by it enough to have it cause them problems. Otherwise no one wants to go through the bureaucracy to kick off any sort of change effort, which leaves a lot of ticking time-bombs in the infrastructure configurations, application designs and application code.

The only place documentation is good, is if it is meaningful, and in the code, where it is readily findable and far less likely to get lost, short of some fool deleting it.

Documentation located anywhere else will be lost, or obsolete many more times than not, before you ever really need it.

If anything, documentation in code should be reviewed by people with absolutely no connection to the application it is for. If it is good enough for them to figure out an understand what is being done, and more importantly why it is being done, only then is it worth anything more than the bytes is written with in storage.

That's the real test

I will continue with my current Kindle, or it's successors: e-paper, whether b/w or color. I prefer it to LCD's, and their power hungry, can't read in daylight issues. I suspect Amazon is just jumping on the bandwagon, so I do not hole out hope for anything more than a well designed LCD e-reader to compete with the NOOK LCD. What I am waiting for is color e-paper with a refresh rate fast enough for video, 60 cps or faster. Then add a flexible, wireless keyboard embedding in a cover, so I can replace my kindle, and I can replace my laptop. Maybe even flexible e-paper. The new Lenovo think tablet comes close as you can with current tech, with the optional hard portfolio case, but it still uses an LCD.

Pretty much like today only more so.

The problem is learning ABAP. You can only really learn it on a SAP system, which means you have to already work at an SAP customer. There are very few places you can learn it otherwise. You can try the basement schools you see advertised in Indian sources all ove the world. I did that for a BASIS course. But without some sort of official SAP training, it will be almost impossible to get work. (try sulekha.com for an example) As someone that went through an SAP conversion, had training for ABAP both in-house and at SAP's training centers near Boston and near Philly, as well as private BASIS training, I can tell you SAP is not that great a system to work in. Yes, there is demand, but that is because it will burn, or bore, you out fairly quickly. They need to replace people fairly often as the burn out. SAP is an extremely complex system with close to 2 dozen separate, specialized modules. Consider it a massive CICS system, sitting on top of a virtual operating system (BASIS) that runs under any of many different operating systems, that accesses data from a deeply integrated database that does not need to be on the same OS. I went BACK to mainframe COBOL, and now also Unix/Linux scripting and PL/Sql. It is by far more fun, you have a lot more freedom to think up your own solution. In ABAP, most of what you do is the equivalent of TPS reports, or moving data between tables. (SAP is ALL tables, thousands of them). The only people that really enjoy SAP are the people cashing the checks in Waldorf Germany.

Mostly. But if Nissan wants to do it right, they will only sell the system with the additional hardware needed, or some other way to discourage just hacking up a double-male plug to go from the gen to a wall socket. Don't get me wrong, it is a cool idea. But it could be a bad situation of someone screws up.

If you just try to plug this into a wall socket, you could feed electricity out of your house into the power lines people are working on. Something that idiots installing home-center purchased generators have been known to do. This is why when power generators are properly installed, they use cutoffs and safety switches between the house and the main utility meter to prevent back feeding power into the grid when nothing is coming in. Anyone that does this should only run a line from the car to an outlet strip to power a few critical items, unless a proper system is installed and inspected to prevent that back-feed.

Check the calendar, it's 40 years since the 1970's Modern diesel cars do not have soot coming out of them. they use low sulfur fuel, and the engines do not cost twice as much. Just go to the VW US site and compare the prices for the diesel version of any of the cars with the gas model of equivalent power. And compare the diesel mileage to both the equivalent gas engine or the most economical gas engine, diesel wins both times. The only wonder is the stupid prejudice manufacturers have about how the public will react to diesel. It scared Honda from offering the what many consider to be the best passenger car diesel in the world to US consumers. A decision I am still mad about. The other wonder is why small diesels are not offered in the US in light duty pickups, like F150, Dakota, Tacoma. The efficiency and power make all kinds of sense there too.

Releasing secrets is often good, as many secrets just protect the asses of corrupt vested interests. But why do we see no releases of secrets from potential threats to free societies? Like China, various idiot countries like N. Korea, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc? Just sayin'...

It issues degrees based on granting credits for life experience, CLEP testing, and self-study course. They have no classrooms and are fully accredited and are a NJ state school, not a private Phoenix-like school. There are a few other schools like it around if you look. One of them is likely to offer a degree you want. http://www.tesc.edu/

I concur. I bought a Lenovo T61 a few years back because of the quality of the hardware and support. And I worked for Sony and used a co. issued VAIO. (I bought it with SLED as the OS, tired of it and installed XP, and then upgraded to Win7. Solid with all of them) The support software that comes with it is top notch and the support site is easy to figure out. I do not know whether the same support software is available on the consumer laptops, but I would definitely keep Lenovo on your list to look at.

I have been investigating ways to avoid shoveling, or buy a snow-blower. I have no garage to store it in and my driveway is below grade, so hauling that thing to and from the driveway is at the least inconvenient. And that is without worrying about some drive-by theft if I try leaving it in the driveway over the winter. After looking at the various alternatives, electric cables, hot water from a tank or geo-thermal pumped through plastic pipes, I ran across infra-red heat lamps being used for this. Looks interesting. I have no clue practical this is, or how much it will cost to install yet. But since I need to move and rebuild my driveway anyway, I figure I will ask some contractors for estimates on how much these would add to the cost. Or cost to run for that matter. Here is one link to a somewhat biased source: http://www.infraredheaters.com/snowice.htm#3.0%20%20Overhead

"The other thing I am finding is that, while you don't have be a salesperson, having some level of social skills and the ability to work with clients makes a big difference."

Then hire a friggin' salesman.

If I wanted to be a people person I would have gone into porn, not I.T.

It's all over their parents basement.