Contactors have been part of the IT landscape since the early 1980s. Large project teams were formed to rewrite or convert manual paper based legacy systems and processes to computerised/automated processes. Contractors came into their own as a highly skilled, mobile workforce whose expertise could be used for the duration of the project and then let go when no longer needed.
Despite their long history in our workforce landscape myths still abound around the perceived disadvantages of contracting.
MYTH 1. YOUR SKILLS WILL BECOME OUTDATED
This is a common fear that, over time and without training, your skills will become redundant and it will be hard to find work. This can be a problem not only for contractors but also permanent employees who don’t invest time inself-training. You do need to work hard at keeping your skills updated and there are many courses and training materials out there to help you do it. Read more…
To secure your next job (marriage, goal in life) the ‘Importance of being Earnest’ is no less true today than it was it was for Oscar Wilde in 1895. Employers hire candidates who appear genuinely interested in the role, the company and the prospects.
Here are 8 tips on how you can demonstrate your “earnestness”
- Be Punctual. Allow plenty of time for getting lost and traffic snarls. Being late indicates poor organisation and a cavalier attitude to the interviewer’s time.
- Dress appropriately. You need to dress a step above the norm for the environment you are interviewing in. It demonstrates respect for the occasion. If everyone is wearing jeans and T-shirts wear slacks and a long sleeve buttoned shirt. If they are in slacks and shirt wear a suit. If in doubt wear the suit. You can always take the tie off.
- Turn the mobile OFF. Answering a call during an interview indicates the job is less important to you than your mate on the other end of the phone.
- If you are sitting in a room waiting stand UP when your interviewer comes into the room. It is a mark if respect and conversely shows disrespect if you don’t.
- The handshake. A firm handshake, pumping the hand once or twice with a steady grip and then release conveys openness and affability and just the right amount of earnestness. It puts everyone at ease. A limp or conversely a bone crunching shake will make people feel uncomfortable and start the interview off on the wrong foot. Read more…
GPUs or Graphics Processing Units were designed as “graphics accelerators”. They were a microprocessor, attached to a graphics card, for offloading floating point calculations. It allowed early 2D graphics to run much faster than by using the host CPU directly. The 1990s saw an explosion into 3D graphics with PlayStation and Nintendo 64 as early examples. GPUs were initially used to accelerate the memory intensive work of texture mapping. Later units were added to accelerate geometric calculations such as the rotation and translation of vertices.
In 2002 GPUs added programmable shading – where each pixel could be processed by a short program that included additional image textures as inputs, before it was projected onto the screen. Parallel GPUs had become as flexible as the CPU while they offered several orders of magnitude higher performance than a conventional CPU. This was particularly true in applications requiring massive vector operations.
It was a fact that did not go unnoticed for long. A new stream of development, the GPGPU or General Purpose GPU, has seen the GPU move out of the purely gaming graphics world and into fields such as scientific calculations and image processing, 3D reconstruction and Stock Option pricing determination.
To really go mainstream the programming for GPU’s needs to get easier. The July 22 2010 launch of Nvidia’s CUDA 3.1 Software Development Kit and the Parallel Nsight plug-in for Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE could be just the ticket…
This is a question we have probably been asking ourselves since societies first formed. Have the tools, and weapons, we have made throughout the Ages made us happier, safer and increased our quality of life?
The technical advances in medicine such as antibiotics, cancer research, heart monitors, cures for childhood diseases, means we are able to live longer healthier lives. The huge advances in communication means the world is at our fingertips. We are able to coordinate globally, rapid aid responses to natural disasters.
Technology has, with the invention of household appliances, online banking, mobile phones, the internet, given a lot more free time back to the individual. But what are we doing with this new “free time”. Has it increased our quality of life? Do we use it to help mankind or take time out to just “smell the roses”? I suspect we just fill it up with more tasks – easy to do when technology has made us accessible 24/7.
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