I'd never heard of the CLEPs; the web site is here. It looks like one thing to be careful about is that the major state schools have only limited acceptance of CLEPs. I was curious, so I checked Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, and William and Mary (guess where I live). Only Tech accepts CLEPs, and only for a limited number of really general classes (mostly languages). So what'd you'd probably have to do is launder the CLEPs through a smaller college to get a 2-year degree in short time, and then finish it off at a larger school (or one of those 2-3 programs that some schools offer). I'm not sure that would save any time over the conventional approach, though; and that seemed to be the submitters objective. You can see which schools accept CLEPs here.

I'm not sure where the grandparent gets the idea of "an anti-business zeitgeist" either. I must admit I'm not up on the variety of opinions held by the various communities of the entire United States, but I seem to recall hearing about many communities that get involved in tax bidding wars to attract companies, and many of the major "Rust Belt" cities still bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs in a way that makes you think they would take them back if they were offered.

One of my friends had a similar experience. His background was in computer engineering, but he was doing a detail with the finance / accountancy group in his office to get some cross-training. He mentioned he spent a good part of his time updating and improving the finance group's VBA scripts.

I also agree that having a better knowledge of the capabilities of your office productivity suite can save a lot of time. I've pretty much given up reformatting all of the poorly aligned, and space- and font-ridden documents that come across my desk from the various secretaries and administrative personnel in the company. I almost wish we had either a more complicated or more feature-limited office suite; so that only smart people could use it, or so that you couldn't shoot yourself in the foot with it.

The only thing to watch out for is that, given the rapid pace of computer technology development, many older edition training course may have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. I would be cautious about material older than 10 years (circa 2000), and material older than 15 years (circa 1995) is probably too old to use. Observe the changes to Java, C++, Ruby, and streaming media in those time frames

Of course, many of the fundamentals of computer science (algorithms and algorithm analysis) and software development (structured programming, abstraction) haven't changed, but then it comes down to whether you are doing a more "technical" introduction to computer programming, or a more "abstract" introduction to computer science.

Would that involve promotion as GLG-20 field agents?

That's the problem. The some of the "cost savings" the managers want comes from using commodity parts and operating systems, with a thin veneer over top to perform the domain specific activities that the managers need. As a simple example, if I make a cash register out of a cheap netbook, I can take advantage of the huge market in netbooks, and keep my costs low. If I have custom hardware made, then I have to eat all the costs of production, instead of amortizing it over a bunch of other customers. Now there are markets for customizable sensors and computers, etc, (see National Instruments), that do have ratings for industrial and safety use, but since it's a more limited market, and certs cost money, these parts are more expensive (but probably not as much as custom equipment).

Just think of your teenage daughter..sex training...

I find your ideas interesting, and would like to subscribe to your magazine.

That would have been a pretty awesome demonstration of the codec, though.

But if you aren't wearing pants, where do you keep your wallet with your business cards?

Although this does explain some of the odd looks I've received at recent meetings.

I'm not sure if I was "inspired" to be a scientist by film, but I would say that the movies "Ghostbusters" and "Back To The Future" certainly provided me with a lot of motivation for "Science!" (with the exclaimation point). I'm not sure, though, if those movies actually helped shape my interests, or whether they just resonated strongly with my existing interests and proclivities. And those were two of the most popular films of the 1980's, so it might be more correct to say "Awesome movies inspire people", which is one of the general reasons for pursing cinematography as an occupation (I'm sure GB and BTTF also inspired a lot of comedians and film students, too).

And it's not like Ghostbusters or BTTF are particularly accurate protrayals of the scientific or engineering process, either. I'm not sure I'd want to see an "accurate" film about the scientific process, though: wouldn't it be just a long montage sequence of all the reagents that didn't work; with a gripping B-plot on writing a grant proposal. That said, most films about a particular field or occupation are heavily dramatized. Haven't several people commented that shows like CSI use incredibly compressed evidence gathering cycles; and that in the real world it takes a month or so to process DNA evidence, and most crime scenes are either inconclusive, or heavily contamiated by the victim's dog before the cops ever get there.

As a very broad, crude generalization, introducing the reality of occupations, like science or business or the technical fields or agriculture, into movies is probably desirable, more as anti-inspirational "warning" than anything else. Most of these jobs are boring most of the time, so stay away. But if we present the jobs honestly and with reasonable fidelity, then the one-in-a-thousand that isn't turned off by it might actually be a good fit for that job. The film doesn't have to "inspire" people, just broaden their horizons so they are at least aware of the opportunities available.

Anyway, this is what happens when I ramble on caffeine.

Which, of course, is compounded by the looming "Minesweeper" gap.

The difficulty is that this is Schroedinger we're talking about. There isn't so much subtext as... text. See
here and here.

Bite your tongue. "Swimlanes" and "rice bowls" are probably the cause of half of the problems in my office. I understand that it's necessisary to break down an organization into subcomponents in order to make it managable (to avoid a Brooksian catastrophe), but we haven't implemented anything to allow people to easily change lanes (turn signals?). So the only time people come into your "swimlane" is when upper management has decreed it, which means that project is more favored than yours, which means you are going to get dicked over. If we made it easier for lane changes to happen, such that it happened enough that it became commonplace, people wouldn't be so dangerously backstabbing and paranoid.

How about some drivers that implement the other serial features of the existing hardware. You know something other than 8N1. It's not like the chipset manual provides functional code snippets to implement those features or whatever...

Unfortunately, the existance of code-fixing faeries was disproven by Wirth in 1972. Code fixes are actually implemented by type of cobbler elf.