...that's what language is about. Language is constantly changing, exactly through the common usage/mistake mechanism you attribute to lack of education. A simple example is the evolution of a compound word. These start as two words (e.g. Web site), sometimes go through a hyphenated phase (e.g. Web-site), and end up as a single word (e.g. Website) frequently losing punctuation along the way (e.g. website).
Think of it as a capitalistic language marketplace, where many things are attempted but only the truly useful or convenient show any longevity. New words and meanings are constantly being created and discarded, typically by the young, who tend to be the language entrepreneurs since they are experimenting in ways to define themselves and have the greatest stake in being (or at least appearing) different.
If you're interested in more details about how this works, try a Google search on Etymology or Evolution of Language.
Other vendors typically have it for less than Amazon. Go to Dealtime and use their book price comparison engine to get the best price. In this case, they report that Walmart has it for $31.49. And if you provide your zip code, they can compare prices including shipping.
And, of course, there's always half.com for used books.
Don't compare yourself to the lobbyists, compare yourself to the corporations who hire the lobbyists. It's the opinions of the principles of the corporations that the lobbyists are being paid to promote, not (necessarily) their own opinions. You want your opinions to be heard; you don't (at least I assume you don't) want to be paid to present to elected officials the opinions of others.
How does this apply to your post? Corporate principles with access to a lot of money that really isn't theirs are having their opinions presented to elected officials in disproportion to their numbers. The question is not how do you as an individual directly get the ear of elected officials but, more generally, how do you get your opinions heard? One answer is that you contribute money or time to organizations that represent your opinions and, as a group, can afford to hire lobbyists to present them on behalf of the members of the organization. An example that is pertinent but much overused on Slashdot is the EFF.
There is no constitutional guarantee that you have the right to be heard by elected officials in any way other than casting your vote or raising your voice in a public forum (i.e. free speech). As a matter of fact, Senators weren't even elected by public ballot until 1914; they were appointed by the States.
Good point. Since it's difficult for employers to discern your actual skill level, once you claim to have the broader skill set they'll take the easier path and filter you by the work experience you claim to have with the broader set. This frustration is, of course, the source of resume fudging, but that's another post...
The only thing I can think of to get around the catch 22 (i.e. needing the experience so you can get the job that gets you the experience) is to get together with a couple of buddies, come up with a project, and pursue it as though it were a real project for an employer. At least you'll have something you can show if a prospective employer asks for something you've done with those skills. And you might even find that the project itself turns into a moneymaker of the germ of an idea for one.
I know very well what you were referring to. However, the original post and my replies were referring to US auto prices and US dollars. Yes, we in the US need to be more aware that the US is not the entire world, but if you wanted to make your post as meaningful as possible to the thread, you would've replied about US median incomes and then diverted to the Australasian study.
If you had read my criticism, you would have understood that it was not referring to your insightful suggestion that I consider other economic factors, but the fact that you made what was purported to be a statement of fact without any apparent attempt to adequately reference it. Yes, you saw it in dead tree form but did you even check to see if there was an online version of the report that you could have linked to and we all could have read? Did you even mention the name of the dead tree publication so anyone who was interested could do the search themselves? No...and neither do most of the slashdot posters. Maybe I didn't make it as clear as I could have, but that was the source of my consternation, not your criticism of my post.
Oh yeah. And in case you're gonna say anything about after-tax income, Tax Freedom Day (the date on which taxpayers have, on average, earned enough income to pay their annual taxes) in the US was April 17 in 1976 and April 27 this past year. Changes the number of months needed to work to actually pay for the average car to roughly 16 in 1976 and 11 in 2001 but doesn't change the outcome. Namely that cars now cost less roughly a third less in real dollars than they did in 1976.
Median household income in the US remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1996 at ~$34,000 (1996 dollars). So, even though the price of an average car might have risen from $10,000 to $22,000 in raw dollars, the real cost dropped from roughly 1 year's income to roughly 8 months income.
Now I'm gonna rag on you (and, frankly, the majority of slashdotters) a bit. If you're gonna make statements that are supposedly factual, for god's sake reference them or provide a link. We're all on the Internet, dammit! It's all about finding information. It took me three minutes to find the link I provided above. It sure as hell wouldn't have taken you more than ten if you bothered to try!
This is why we end up with 300 comments on an article and only 30 of them worth reading.
"The only things that can save are an incredible development in the economy that drastically increases real wealth in a short period of time..."
It was, in great part, our need to believe, as a nation, that there was an easy way out of the impending Social Security debacle that caused us to accept the "new economy" malarky that was the primary driver of the internet/stockmarket bubble. There were plenty of voices telling us that the old measures of corporate worth were being too hastily discarded. As a nation, we (and our leaders) didn't want to listen.
The problem is still there. And once we're finished reeling from the concussion wave generated by the bursting of the bubble, we're still going to have to deal with it. But we'll have wasted the last 10 years and the pain will be accordingly worse. What will the next "easy fix" be and will we be wise enough to see it for what it is?
...about 90% of the population considering themselves to be above average? All I could find was this.
Anyway, the point is that the worse you are at something, the more inflated your opinion of your abilities tends to be (I call this "first belt syndrome"...anyone who has studied a martial art will understand the reference), especially if your ego is tied up in doing well at that thing. It's times like these that force many of us to stop using the fun-house mirrors and start figuring out what we really are good at.
And if you still really think you're top notch but not getting the interviews, it's probably your resume and cover letter. Have someone who writes for a living (and does it well) help you get them into shape.
You need more than good coding skills to land a job in the current market. Everyone has (or claims to have) coding skills and, when an employer gets a mountain of resumes, they have to choose other criteria to weed through them.
Case in point. I was laid off last June. I lived in an area that has a small market for software developers and tried (and failed) to find a job there for three months. Actually, I found one at a 20% pay cut but salaries were low in the area to begin with and we just took that offer as proof that we needed to sell our home and move to a bigger market. Over the next three months of widening my search to nationwide, I got two interviews and one offer (which I took). In both cases, I was told that coding skills were a dime a dozen and the only reason I was interviewed at all was because of my full-lifecycle development skills (documented project experience writing business requirements, technical specs, test plans, and user manuals).
So if you want a job in this market, find out what employers are looking for and broaden your skill set. Writing one more java widget to be able to claim 5 years of java coding instead of 4 isn't going to cut it when employers are now looking for java and flash and XML and photoshop and pig farming all in the same employee (well, I made up the part about pig farming).
No, I don't believe that the Supreme Court must rely on Congress to do anything in this case (much less police itself). The issue before the Supreme Court is whether this particular law is in violation of the Constitution. There are particular requirements of Congress in order for them to change the Constitution and they cannot do that by the simple passage of a law. Hence, if the Supreme Court deems that the law under its review is in violation of the Constitution, the law is struck down. Congress can choose to pass another law that does not violate the constitution in the way the previous law did. In crafting that law, they would rely on the written opinions that accompanied the Supreme Court decision. And that new law might eventually end up back under review of the Supreme Court.
Typically, the Supreme Court is very picky about the cases it decides to review because they want a clear outcome that won't result in another law passed by Congress and addressing the same issue right back in their laps for review.
But no, they're not relying on Congress for anything.
Cars are actually less expensive today if you adjust for inflation!
According to this inflation calculator, $10,000 in 1976 has the same purchasing power as $31,500 in 2001. So, a car would have to cost $31,500 today to cost the same in inflation adjusted dollars to a $10,000 car in 1976. The fact that it costs less than that today means that the real cost of cars has come down since 1976.
Re:Mozilla succeeded through persistance and visio
on
Open Source Studies
·
· Score: 1
Even so, they didn't set out to do it that way, did they?. Wasn't their hand was forced by the market drubbing they were taking?
It's all well and good to focus on the characteristics of a successful OSS project. It's extremely interesting that these projects succeeded without elements that are considered to be fundamental to success in commercial development. However, studying success provides only half the picture. It won't tell you what things to avoid that tend to make OSS projects fail. Without that knowledge, attempts to reproduce and improve upon the methods used by Apache and Mozilla will experience unforseen failures that could have been avoided.
Companies are in business to maximize profits. How unethical they can be in that pursuit has been the subject of quite a few recent news stories. The profit made by a certification company is determined by a balance of cost and demand. Demand is directly proportional to how easy it is to pass the certification. Perceived value of having the certification is inversely proportional to how easy it is to pass the certification. Chart these factors (and others) and you should find that there is a target failure rate that will maximize profits. A company seeking to maximize profits will design their certification process to achieve this target. This almost always results in behavior that is not optimal for the common good.
Is this ethical? Depends on where you think the primary responsibilities of a company lie...shareholder/owner profit or societal good. But that's another slashdot post.;)
There are plenty of industries where following the money would make you think twice about the motivations of the seller of services. How about financial planners/brokers who make more cash by churning your investments? How about the auto mechanic who makes more cash by replacing your radiator when all it needed was an external cleaning (true personal experience here)? How about [fill in your own example here...everyone has one]?
At this point, if you're not always questioning whether a service provider is taking you for a ride, then you're being taken for a ride.
Theory is tested not only by what it explains but what it predicts. That's one reason Einstein's Theory of Relativity is such a marvel. Time after time, seemingly counterintuitive insights about the behavior of physical systems that are predicted by the theory are shown to be actual, verifiable behaviors. Einstein just didn't have the tools at the time to measure them.
So here's a question for both the evolutionists (proponent of the Theory of Evolution) and the creationists (proponents of the Theory of God):
What predictions can you make or have been made based upon the theory you espouse and how can we go about verifying them?
Doesn't this kind of go against the theory of natural selection? I mean, if the mutated gene is hidden, then there really isn't a difference between the inferior and superior versions, so the gene pool won't be improved.
Not really. Suddenly hostile environment would probably kill off a large proportion of the population in a short time (evolutionarily speaking). If any hidden combination of genes expressed themselves then and even slightly affected the odds of survival then the resulting population would be replete with this set of genes.
Slashdot Mirror
...that's what language is about. Language is constantly changing, exactly through the common usage/mistake mechanism you attribute to lack of education. A simple example is the evolution of a compound word. These start as two words (e.g. Web site), sometimes go through a hyphenated phase (e.g. Web-site), and end up as a single word (e.g. Website) frequently losing punctuation along the way (e.g. website).
Think of it as a capitalistic language marketplace, where many things are attempted but only the truly useful or convenient show any longevity. New words and meanings are constantly being created and discarded, typically by the young, who tend to be the language entrepreneurs since they are experimenting in ways to define themselves and have the greatest stake in being (or at least appearing) different.
If you're interested in more details about how this works, try a Google search on Etymology or Evolution of Language.
I write and business model professionally...
Ooooh. A professional business model! Might I have seen you in those Victoria's Secret ads?
It's a fancy new technique called Marketing.
But that doesn't make it any less annoying.
Other vendors typically have it for less than Amazon. Go to Dealtime and use their book price comparison engine to get the best price. In this case, they report that Walmart has it for $31.49. And if you provide your zip code, they can compare prices including shipping.
And, of course, there's always half.com for used books.
Don't compare yourself to the lobbyists, compare yourself to the corporations who hire the lobbyists. It's the opinions of the principles of the corporations that the lobbyists are being paid to promote, not (necessarily) their own opinions. You want your opinions to be heard; you don't (at least I assume you don't) want to be paid to present to elected officials the opinions of others.
How does this apply to your post? Corporate principles with access to a lot of money that really isn't theirs are having their opinions presented to elected officials in disproportion to their numbers. The question is not how do you as an individual directly get the ear of elected officials but, more generally, how do you get your opinions heard? One answer is that you contribute money or time to organizations that represent your opinions and, as a group, can afford to hire lobbyists to present them on behalf of the members of the organization. An example that is pertinent but much overused on Slashdot is the EFF.
There is no constitutional guarantee that you have the right to be heard by elected officials in any way other than casting your vote or raising your voice in a public forum (i.e. free speech). As a matter of fact, Senators weren't even elected by public ballot until 1914; they were appointed by the States.
Good point. Since it's difficult for employers to discern your actual skill level, once you claim to have the broader skill set they'll take the easier path and filter you by the work experience you claim to have with the broader set. This frustration is, of course, the source of resume fudging, but that's another post...
The only thing I can think of to get around the catch 22 (i.e. needing the experience so you can get the job that gets you the experience) is to get together with a couple of buddies, come up with a project, and pursue it as though it were a real project for an employer. At least you'll have something you can show if a prospective employer asks for something you've done with those skills. And you might even find that the project itself turns into a moneymaker of the germ of an idea for one.
Good luck.
I know very well what you were referring to. However, the original post and my replies were referring to US auto prices and US dollars. Yes, we in the US need to be more aware that the US is not the entire world, but if you wanted to make your post as meaningful as possible to the thread, you would've replied about US median incomes and then diverted to the Australasian study.
If you had read my criticism, you would have understood that it was not referring to your insightful suggestion that I consider other economic factors, but the fact that you made what was purported to be a statement of fact without any apparent attempt to adequately reference it. Yes, you saw it in dead tree form but did you even check to see if there was an online version of the report that you could have linked to and we all could have read? Did you even mention the name of the dead tree publication so anyone who was interested could do the search themselves? No...and neither do most of the slashdot posters. Maybe I didn't make it as clear as I could have, but that was the source of my consternation, not your criticism of my post.
Oh yeah. And in case you're gonna say anything about after-tax income, Tax Freedom Day (the date on which taxpayers have, on average, earned enough income to pay their annual taxes) in the US was April 17 in 1976 and April 27 this past year. Changes the number of months needed to work to actually pay for the average car to roughly 16 in 1976 and 11 in 2001 but doesn't change the outcome. Namely that cars now cost less roughly a third less in real dollars than they did in 1976.
Median household income in the US remained roughly unchanged between 1976 and 1996 at ~$34,000 (1996 dollars). So, even though the price of an average car might have risen from $10,000 to $22,000 in raw dollars, the real cost dropped from roughly 1 year's income to roughly 8 months income.
Now I'm gonna rag on you (and, frankly, the majority of slashdotters) a bit. If you're gonna make statements that are supposedly factual, for god's sake reference them or provide a link. We're all on the Internet, dammit! It's all about finding information. It took me three minutes to find the link I provided above. It sure as hell wouldn't have taken you more than ten if you bothered to try!
This is why we end up with 300 comments on an article and only 30 of them worth reading.
Go ahead and flame me, I don't care.
"The only things that can save are an incredible development in the economy that drastically increases real wealth in a short period of time..."
It was, in great part, our need to believe, as a nation, that there was an easy way out of the impending Social Security debacle that caused us to accept the "new economy" malarky that was the primary driver of the internet/stockmarket bubble. There were plenty of voices telling us that the old measures of corporate worth were being too hastily discarded. As a nation, we (and our leaders) didn't want to listen.
The problem is still there. And once we're finished reeling from the concussion wave generated by the bursting of the bubble, we're still going to have to deal with it. But we'll have wasted the last 10 years and the pain will be accordingly worse. What will the next "easy fix" be and will we be wise enough to see it for what it is?
...about 90% of the population considering themselves to be above average? All I could find was this.
Anyway, the point is that the worse you are at something, the more inflated your opinion of your abilities tends to be (I call this "first belt syndrome"...anyone who has studied a martial art will understand the reference), especially if your ego is tied up in doing well at that thing. It's times like these that force many of us to stop using the fun-house mirrors and start figuring out what we really are good at.
And if you still really think you're top notch but not getting the interviews, it's probably your resume and cover letter. Have someone who writes for a living (and does it well) help you get them into shape.
You need more than good coding skills to land a job in the current market. Everyone has (or claims to have) coding skills and, when an employer gets a mountain of resumes, they have to choose other criteria to weed through them.
Case in point. I was laid off last June. I lived in an area that has a small market for software developers and tried (and failed) to find a job there for three months. Actually, I found one at a 20% pay cut but salaries were low in the area to begin with and we just took that offer as proof that we needed to sell our home and move to a bigger market. Over the next three months of widening my search to nationwide, I got two interviews and one offer (which I took). In both cases, I was told that coding skills were a dime a dozen and the only reason I was interviewed at all was because of my full-lifecycle development skills (documented project experience writing business requirements, technical specs, test plans, and user manuals).
So if you want a job in this market, find out what employers are looking for and broaden your skill set. Writing one more java widget to be able to claim 5 years of java coding instead of 4 isn't going to cut it when employers are now looking for java and flash and XML and photoshop and pig farming all in the same employee (well, I made up the part about pig farming).
No, I don't believe that the Supreme Court must rely on Congress to do anything in this case (much less police itself). The issue before the Supreme Court is whether this particular law is in violation of the Constitution. There are particular requirements of Congress in order for them to change the Constitution and they cannot do that by the simple passage of a law. Hence, if the Supreme Court deems that the law under its review is in violation of the Constitution, the law is struck down. Congress can choose to pass another law that does not violate the constitution in the way the previous law did. In crafting that law, they would rely on the written opinions that accompanied the Supreme Court decision. And that new law might eventually end up back under review of the Supreme Court.
Typically, the Supreme Court is very picky about the cases it decides to review because they want a clear outcome that won't result in another law passed by Congress and addressing the same issue right back in their laps for review.
But no, they're not relying on Congress for anything.
NO NO NO!
Cars are actually less expensive today if you adjust for inflation!
According to this inflation calculator, $10,000 in 1976 has the same purchasing power as $31,500 in 2001. So, a car would have to cost $31,500 today to cost the same in inflation adjusted dollars to a $10,000 car in 1976. The fact that it costs less than that today means that the real cost of cars has come down since 1976.
Even so, they didn't set out to do it that way, did they?. Wasn't their hand was forced by the market drubbing they were taking?
It's all well and good to focus on the characteristics of a successful OSS project. It's extremely interesting that these projects succeeded without elements that are considered to be fundamental to success in commercial development. However, studying success provides only half the picture. It won't tell you what things to avoid that tend to make OSS projects fail. Without that knowledge, attempts to reproduce and improve upon the methods used by Apache and Mozilla will experience unforseen failures that could have been avoided.
...Treat yourself...Indulge your deZire...
Very odd for a Japanese company to name a robotic servant after an ancient catholic ascetic.
True and not true.
;)
Companies are in business to maximize profits. How unethical they can be in that pursuit has been the subject of quite a few recent news stories. The profit made by a certification company is determined by a balance of cost and demand. Demand is directly proportional to how easy it is to pass the certification. Perceived value of having the certification is inversely proportional to how easy it is to pass the certification. Chart these factors (and others) and you should find that there is a target failure rate that will maximize profits. A company seeking to maximize profits will design their certification process to achieve this target. This almost always results in behavior that is not optimal for the common good.
Is this ethical? Depends on where you think the primary responsibilities of a company lie...shareholder/owner profit or societal good. But that's another slashdot post.
There are plenty of industries where following the money would make you think twice about the motivations of the seller of services. How about financial planners/brokers who make more cash by churning your investments? How about the auto mechanic who makes more cash by replacing your radiator when all it needed was an external cleaning (true personal experience here)? How about [fill in your own example here...everyone has one]?
At this point, if you're not always questioning whether a service provider is taking you for a ride, then you're being taken for a ride.
My God! Someone got the joke!
Theory is tested not only by what it explains but what it predicts. That's one reason Einstein's Theory of Relativity is such a marvel. Time after time, seemingly counterintuitive insights about the behavior of physical systems that are predicted by the theory are shown to be actual, verifiable behaviors. Einstein just didn't have the tools at the time to measure them.
So here's a question for both the evolutionists (proponent of the Theory of Evolution) and the creationists (proponents of the Theory of God):
Doesn't this kind of go against the theory of natural selection? I mean, if the mutated gene is hidden, then there really isn't a difference between the inferior and superior versions, so the gene pool won't be improved.
Not really. Suddenly hostile environment would probably kill off a large proportion of the population in a short time (evolutionarily speaking). If any hidden combination of genes expressed themselves then and even slightly affected the odds of survival then the resulting population would be replete with this set of genes.
How are we going to adopt a technology when MS is deciding for the users what is best.
That's easy...L-I-N-U-X
Good points. Looks like I should've done a bit more homework before posting.
So, as an act of contrition, here's where anyone who's interested can read just what the copyright laws are and their guidelines for enforcement.