Month: August 2015

Let’s say you’re trying to tackle this whole retirement thing, and that means it’s time to beef up your savings. If you’re looking into an individual retirement account (IRA), you’ll have to decide between a traditional or Roth IRA. There are a number of factors that go into picking the best option, and this calculator can help you decide.

Traditional and Roth IRAs are different in quite a few ways, but it mostly comes down to this:

• Traditional IRAs are tax-deferred, meaning any money you save in them is subtracted from your taxable income that year. When you withdraw the money at retirement, you’ll pay taxes on the money.
• Roth IRAs are taxed now. You don’t get that tax-deferral option, but when you take the money out at retirement, you don’t have to pay taxes, because you already paid.

We’ve told you the ins and outs of how IRAs work, so you’ll want to thoroughly research which option is best for you. But this calculator can at least put you in the right direction. You enter in details about your tax rate, savings rate, expected savings return, and so on. From there, the calculator tells you how much you can expect to earn (considering taxes and return) with one type of IRA over another. You’ll even get graphs that show a side by side comparison.http://ift.tt/1D59DEr…

In order to work, the calculator asks you to plug in your expected retirement rate, and of course, that’s just an estimate, so this isn’t an exact science. Still, it’s a helpful tool because you can adjust the amounts and see just how much you’d earn with each option. You can also see how those numbers change as your tax bracket changes.

Give it a try for yourself at the link below.

Roth IRA vs. Traditional IRA | Dinkytown

via Lifehacker
This Calculator Will Help You Decide Between a Roth or Traditional IRA 

We skipped a week with this column, but this week, I want to talk about the variations in the stormtrooper costume. Not all stormtroopers are the same, and between each film, there’s minor differences that need to be taken into consideration when building your costume.

I’m just thinking about Stormtroopers this week, but there’s other variations, especially when you look at Clone Troopers, Sandtroopers and others. Between the production of each film, the stormtrooper costumes that were used were changed up in small ways.

Take a look at the examples from the three original trilogy movies. Can you spot the differences?

A New Hope:

Empire Strikes Back:

Return of the Jedi:

They’re subtle, but they’re there. In A New Hope, the frown on the helmet is grey, with black in the middle. The holster is on the right, the hand plates are trapezoidal, and the lenses are a greenish color. In The Empire Strikes Back, the frown is entirely black, the eyes are greyish, the hand plates have changed to clamshells and the holster is on the left. Finally, in The Return of the Jedi, the black frown and hand plates are still there (you can’t see them in this picture), but there’s a trim around the edges of the chest plate. There’s some other minor differences in decals that are too hard to see in these images.

These are admittedly very minor differences between each movie, but it shows an interesting thing that happened between each production: they didn’t recycle parts, but changed them up little by little. Thus, when you put together a trooper, you can’t just pull a reference picture from any of the films: the troopers change each time. Trapezoidal hand plates with an all-black frown or trim around the edges of the chest? Not accurate to any of the movies.

For my purposes, I’m going with the troopers from The Empire Strikes Back. So: black frown and new hand plates for me!

Once George Lucas decided to follow up A New Hope with a sequel, he financed it himself. As a result, many of the original stormtroopers costumes that were used in the first film were brought back for the second. When production began, the team reused the ‘stunt’ helmets (those not used on the heroes), and made some changes. The frown was painted entirely black, and the hand-painted details on the helmet – at the temples, next to the eyes, at the back of the head, at the ears and the stripes – were replaced with vinyl duplicates.

More recently, costume historians have discovered that there were some additional costumes cast for Empire Strikes Back. Early in the film’s production, a total of seven stormtroopers were required during the carbon freezing scenes. Later on, however, the scenes required additional stormtroopers. To fill the demand, the film’s costume designer, John Mollo, indicated that they began creating plaster casts off of the existing sets of armor in existence.

Mollo’s notes also indicated that they assembled the suits a bit differently: they ordered new eyes and liners for the helmets, and used elastic and rivets to hold the shoulders in place. Other straps were put into use to hold the suits together a bit better – probably due to feedback from the actors who were involved in some of the early scenes.

Later, for Return of the Jedi, entirely new stormtroopers were constructed for filming.

We’ve already begun seeing pictures from Rogue One hit the web, and no surprise, there’s stromtroopers in this film. Unfortunately, the pictures are a bit too far away to make out any real details – the only thing that I can see for sure is that these stormtroopers do have trapezoidal handplates, rather than the curved ones. Once the publicity of the film ramps up, we’ll likely get some close looks at the costumes, and see how they line up with the ones from a over four decades ago. Once that happens, we’ll have an entirely new designation of stormtrooper: The RO TK.

Top photo credit: Ashley Fraser.

via Gizmodo
So You Want To Join The Empire: Movie-Accurate Troopers

Earlier this year, Intel promised to make an effort to hire more women and minorities, and by the looks of things, the company’s making good on its word. Its latest move? Pledging $250,000 per year for three years to three Navajo Nation high schools in Arizona, in hopes of inspiring kids to become coders. Intel engineer Jolene Bengay (above) announced the company’s project during an event honoring the Navajo code talkers of World War II. "We know that if we’re really going to fill in the (talent) pipeline," said Intel’s Diversity initiative deputy director Barbara McAllister, "we need to aggressively address the gaps in that talent."​

The money will help support the Science Foundation Arizona’s "Code Talkers to Code Writers Initiative" and will be used to train teachers how to code, so they can teach their students in turn. Intel’s Native American employees will also be dropping by to help out, though probably not that often, as there are only 266 in the company.

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Misc, Intel

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Source: USA Today

Tags: coding, diversity, intel, navajo

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Intel pledges money to train potential Navajo code writers

Apple plans to release a new version of the company’s Magic Mouse and Bluetooth wireless keyboard that will use Bluetooth Low Energy and include integrated batteries, according to new filings with the US Federal Communications Commission. The new peripherals will eschew the AA batteries currently used in favor of USB-based charging. Both will use Bluetooth 4.2 with Bluetooth LE, which should result in dramatically longer battery life….

via MacNN | The Macintosh News Network
FCC filings reveal new Bluetooth LE keyboard, Magic Mouse

As we all know, good DBAs are a dime a dozen. They’re easy to replace and the cost of replacing them in terms of lost productivity, downtime, recruiting, training, etc is minimal. You may even suspect that your DBA(s) aren’t very good since there is occasional downtime and people complain about the systems running too slowly. Firing people is icky so we’ve identified 8 great ways to encourage your DBA to leave.
8. Specialize Their Role
Nothing puts more pressure on a DBA to perform than being a specialist. A specialist is the only person who has access or knowledge to do something, which means everyone else is going to be coerced into learned helplessness and apathy. Oh, and the bystander effect will run rampant when something goes wrong. “I’m sure the DBA is working on that.”
Yep. You definitely want the DBA’s role to be specialized so they’re properly isolated and all the blame falls on them when anything goes bad. Certainly don’t want developers and other operations staff to be competent with the database!
7. Institute Change Control
Since you’ve created a specialized DBA role in which all database responsibility rests on the DBA(s) you might as well take the next step to institute strong change control. Since the developers have no responsibility for database performance problems they create, they’ll write code recklessly and figure it’s the DBAs responsibility to fix it. To solve for that all code changes must be reviewed by the DBA before shipping to production. No changes can happen during business hours. And there will be no changes during critical times like the Super Bowl ads or the holiday shopping season, period.
We’re fully confident this’ll solve all the outages, but as a delicious side effect of this, we’ll also rub the DBA’s nose in a bunch of menial, thankless reviews of code and applications they don’t understand, which should incent them to leave right away.
6. Mismatched Control And Responsibility
Nothing punishes a DBA better than being responsible for systems they can’t control. Naturally, item #7 is designed to create the illusion of control, so when they protest, we can point to that and say “what do you mean you have no control over what queries are running in production?” The DBA is not only wholly responsible for database performance, but also for delays in front-end development and feature roll-out.
5. Make Them A SPOF
If you only have one DBA by instituting #8, 7 and 6 above you’ve done a great job of creating a single point of failure. Even with multiple DBAs you’ve created a team of SPOFs. You can add insult to this injury through promotions. The smartest management move I ever saw was when an overworked DBA (let’s call him Atlas, because he held the world on his shoulders) was promoted. I mean, the man just wouldn’t quit. He was in the office at 2am every week doing the things that management insisted couldn’t be done during work hours, he never got to leave or turn off his cellphone from October through January, and this had gone on for years. Clearly a promotion to DBA Manager was the only way to make him quit. Did it work? Sure did, it only took a week.
4. Give Them Great Tools To Do Their Job
As the VP of Technology, it’s clearly your job to tell the DBA what tools they need to do their job. Make sure you do that. Remember, any production MySQL issue can be properly diagnosed by staring at thousands or tens of thousands of time series charts of SHOW STATUS counters in five-minute resolution, so Cacti or Graphite ought to do the job just fine. If they insist on more than that, you can pretend you’re bending over backwards by giving them Nagios or statsd. These create an illusion of database performance monitoring by creating mountains of false alarms tied to ratios that don’t really mean much.
3. Make Sure Developers Can’t Self-Service
Whatever you do, don’t let the developers get their work done by themselves. The DBA can’t truly be a SPOF if the developers can get stuff done without them. You need developers to go to the DBA with every little database-related request. This will impress upon the DBA their essential role in the organization and how they’re failing to live up to it and need to leave. Coincidentally, using Cacti or Graphite for monitoring will help ensure all DB-related questions can only be answered by the DBA.
2. Insist On Root Cause Analysis
There is always a single root cause. Five whys. It’s a human error problem. Who is the human error? The DBA is. The DBA’s very existence is an error. If there are outages, downtime, sluggish performance, delays in code release the root cause has to be database performance and that is the DBA’s responsibility 100%. Creating a revolving door DBA position will guarantee that the people responsible for the database don’t know much about the system because they just got here. Not that that’s an acceptable excuse.
1. Work-Life Balance Is Overrated
You get the most out of your people by driving them hard. No one ever got good results on the battlefield by handing out Kleenex. No matter how many developers you have, 1 DBA is plenty; in fact try to make it a side responsibility for one of your systems admin folks. If they whine about their burdens, tell them to just work harder. Your DBA should be online or in the office after hours, and if they’re not they’re slackers and should be replaced anyway. Stress, guilt, all encompassing responsibility, shame, and failure are powerful motivators, too.
Conclusions
Remember: as an IT Manager/Director/VP you need to have a scapegoat, and your DBA should be that scapegoat. By placing the DBA in an impossible situation, giving them full responsibility for keeping the systems up and running, and keeping them from having collaborative tools that allow developers to self-service and take responsibility for being the first line of defense against bad queries, you’ll always be able to tell your boss that the reason for the problem is poor database administration.
The alternative to using the DBA as your scapegoat is to have that responsibility fall on you! You might have to take responsibility for building or licensing collaboration tools that allow the whole team to function more efficiently. You might have to build a culture of shared responsibility and teamwork. And, while doing so might improve speed, innovation and help attract and keep top drawer developers, it requires change and change is hard.
Much easier to just churn through DBAs.
via Planet MySQL
The 8 Best Ways To Lose Your DBA

A few months after it was accidentally revealed by a UK toy store, and a few days after Amazon started taking pre-orders for it, Lego has officially revealed Pixar animator Angus MacLane’s Lego Ideas WALL•E set—including a brand new photo of the little robot.

Available starting September 1 for $50, the 677-piece set includes a booklet about MacLane and the Pixar film. And instead of recycling the box it comes in, you can crumple it up into a ball of garbage, toss it on the floor, and give your WALL•E more purpose than just a decoration for your home office. Here’s the official description:

Build, display and role play with WALL•E! Construct the LEGO® Ideas version of WALL•E with posable neck, adjustable head and arms, gripping hands, opening trunk and rolling tracks.

Build a beautifully detailed LEGO® version of WALL•E—the last robot left on Earth! Created by Angus MacLane, an animator and director at Pixar Animation Studios, and selected by LEGO Ideas members, the development of this model began alongside the making of the lovable animated character for the classic Pixar feature film. It has taken almost a decade to perfect the LEGO version, which incorporates many authentic WALL•E characteristics, including a posable neck, adjustable head, arms that move up and down and side to side, plus gripping hands and rolling tracks. With a trunk that opens and closes, you can tidy up the planet one pile of garbage at a time! This set also includes a booklet about the designer and the animated Pixar movie.

[Lego Ideas Blog]

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via Gizmodo
Lego Has Finally Officially Revealed Its New WALL•E Set

When you’re stuck in a job you hate, it’s easy to read a few articles about pursuing your dreams and find the validation you were looking for to turn in your resignation letter. But what feels like a terrible job may not be permanently terrible—in certain situations, it may be worth your while to try to fix your job, rather than jump ship.

This post originally appeared on The Muse.

You’ve surely seen the articles floating around the web that list signs that you should quit your job immediately (and if you haven’t, you can read them here, here, and here). Now, there are certainly situations that warrant quitting, and plenty of people are stuck in jobs they hate, when they clearly should be looking for something better.

But sometimes you should focus your energy on improving your current position instead of heading off into the unknown. How can you tell if you may be able to make your current job work? Look for the signs below.

1. You’re Surrounding Yourself With Negativity

If you constantly feel frustrated with your boss, your responsibilities, your co-workers, and the company in general, look to the company you keep at work. Are you grumbling with your colleagues over lunch? Do you spend your breaks tracking down the latest gossip about who got the promotion you wanted and who got invited to lunch by the department manager?

By focusing on complaining, venting, and gossiping, you’re intentionally surrounding yourself with negativity—which may be tainting your perception of your job.

Instead, try focusing on what’s great about your job. Instead of complaining about a missed promotion, work on documenting your achievementsso you can present a better case for yourself next time. Talk to your colleagues about an exciting project you’re working on, rather than venting about the menial task your boss asked you to do.

Can positive thinking solve everything? Not by a long shot. But by attempting to change your mindset, you’ll have a clearer idea of whether the problem is your job—or the way you think about your job.http://ift.tt/1hCWAAv…

2. You Haven’t Created a Plan for Movement

There’s nothing worse than feeling stuck at a job with no foreseeable possibility of advancement. It seems pretty obvious that if there’s no room to grow, it’s time to move on to something different.

But is the issue really that there isn’t room to grow—or that you haven’t proactively collaborated with your boss or HR to determine how to get to the place you want to be?

Maybe, for example, you want to move into a management role within your department, but you keep getting bypassed for promotions. No room for movement, right? Well, probably not unless you work with your boss to identify what you need to do and what skills you need to develop in order to snag the next available promotion.

Or, maybe you need to work with HR to determine if there’s an internal move you could make that would help you better achieve your goals—like moving from the sales team to the sales training team, where you could start putting some management skills to use.

3. You Haven’t Taken a Vacation in Ages

You’ve seen the research, you’ve read it on The Muse, and you’ve even heard it on TV, via commercials advertising credit cards or Las Vegas: In the U.S., employees aren’t using their vacation days.

Let’s be honest: Working an endless stream of 40-plus hour weeks with no break could make anyone want to quit their job. And so, if it’s been a while since your last vacation, the problem may not be that you need to quit your job entirely—but that you need a break from the office to recharge.

Done right—meaning, with as little email-checking as possible—a vacation can help you feel less stressed and more effective at work. And could even give you an entirely new perspective of your current position.

Taking advantage of those unused vacation days to take a break from your job can help you come back with more clarity: Did you just need a few days off? Or do you need a permanent break from your job?http://ift.tt/1WpUW5j…

4. You Haven’t Voiced Your Concerns to Your Boss

Maybe some of the aspects of your job truly are unbearable—e.g., you don’t like your assigned responsibilities, you can’t stand working with your project team, and your workload is so heavy that you’re constantly staying late and working on the weekend.

But unless you’ve actually talked to your boss about these things, you have no idea whether they’re facets of your job that are set in stone, or whether you may actually be able to change your situation.

By simply voicing your concerns to your boss, you may be able to shift your workload, focus your time on different priorities or projects, or transition onto a different project team. Essentially, you may be able to make your current job a whole lot better—without having to polish up your resume.

Before you brush off your resume and cover letter and delve into a job search, it’s worth it to see if your current job can be salvaged. Sometimes, changing your mindset and advocating for yourself can make all the difference.

4 Surprising Signs You Should Fix Your Current Job Instead of Quitting | The Muse

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Katie Douthwaite Wolf’s career and management content has been published on Forbes, Mashable, Business Insider, Inc., and Newsweek. Find her on Twitter.

Image by Mascha Tace (Shutterstock).

via Lifehacker
Four Signs You Should Fix Your Current Job Instead of Quitting

New rash of malvertising attacks threatens millions of Web surfers.
via Ars Technica
My browser visited Drudgereport and all I got was this lousy malware