This marks only the second time that NASA has sought public input for naming a piece of U.S. space station hardware. The Harmony module was named by 2,200 students who entered NASA's naming contest for Node 2. By contrast, 169,000 people have voted online at NASA's naming contest site so far.
The NASA-chosen name Serenity, which shares the name of a spaceship in the cult favorite television series "Firefly", continues to maintain a huge lead with more than 66,000 votes, according to NASA. But a surge of votes has given Colbert 29,000 in just two days, enough for second overall. The trailing vote-getters include Xenu (9,200), Earthrise (4,200), Legacy (3,500) and Venture (3,200).
The urge for the computer industry to reinvent itself every ten or twenty years ('new words for old! new words for old!') is presumably something to do with the urge to foster that appealing sense of mystique that means that businesses are never quite sure what, if anything, they're spending money on. But the Cloud is a particularly silly example.
The ownership of metadata in general has been fought out in various arenas -- who owns what, who gets to transform it and all that are discussed to death in the area of library science, for example. The net result is usually that we all argue ourselves to a standstill and then some damn pragmatist just turns up and solves the whole thing by ignoring the philosophical side of the issue entirely and building stuff that works. Search engines are the classic example of this.
If there's one piece of advice that the cloud people should keep in mind (and many do - not their fault that they're infested with bloggers) it's don't spend your life farting around with airy fairy questions and delightfully fuzzy nomenclature, and do something useful - leave the pseudo-philosophy to the bloggers. Sorry - but I work on the edge of this industry and there are times, usually in front of the tenth powerpoint presentation of the week, that beating the speaker to death with the conference goodie bag seems like the only ethical option.
Frankly the summary presents the research far more pretentiously than I hope PARC would prefer. It's a little like saying
"In order to go to the corner shop for a bottle of milk, we negotiated release of planned security mechanisms on the warm/cool air boundary designed to limit unauthorised perambulation, thus obtaining access to the pedestrian displacement area."
That said, the researchers according to TFA apparently did 'spend much of 2008 getting access to live data' - so apparently they are using something other than the open access downloads. It makes me wonder why they didn't just use the recent changes facility from each page, but undoubtedly they have their reasons.
TFA is worth a quick read, and suggests that this Wikidashboard business is an interesting example of the general genre of 'presenting some facet of edit data in a concise and accessible way', along with stuff like WikiScanner, recent change statistics and so on, but it doesn't seem that revolutionary, really.
I've had a lot of Nokia phones in the past (brand loyalty or laziness - you decide) and only ever saw two types of power adaptor in use - ever since the 'matrix phone' (7110) in 1999, each phone had the same plug, all the way up to the 9500. It wasn't til I got an N70 that a new plug appeared - same sort of cylindrical plug but narrower diameter. They seem to have stuck with that since, as far as I can tell, and indeed they did provide an adapter so the older chargers could be used with the new phones.
The only problem with using the charger I got for the 7110 for my newest bits of Nokia kit is that the these days the chargers they give out are allegedly 'fast' chargers, which I assume means that more power can be drawn from them to charge the battery faster - so the 7110's charger is the modern-day power supply equivalent of a 1x CD-RW (I've got one of those, too. It's actually got a caddy loading system. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways)
Yeah, I agree with you about the skill level required to install Slackware. I first installed Slackware in the mid-90s as a kid, and it was not a very hard process. My main problem really was what to do with it once I got it installed. Then I discovered hangman, and from that point on I was hooked. How hooked? Well, I'm typing this on Slackware...
I did try SUSE, but threw the disk out in a fit of nerd rage once I realised that it needed more memory than my laptop had (8 megs at the time) just to install. And Red Hat, which was at a funny stage in its development and committed a form of complicated suicide after a couple of months due to some error or other in an init script. I also tried Mandrake, liked it, but... somehow I always seem to go back to Slack.
Peter joined the Metropolitan Police Service in 1971 and completed his police career in 2002 as the Borough Commander for Hackney. During his service he worked in the Obscene Publications Branch at Scotland Yard and liaised regularly with Child Protection Units. He specialised in inner city policing and public disorder events and acted as an independent police advisor to the Independent Electoral Commission in South Africa in 1994.
He was awarded the Queens Police Medal in 2001 for distinguished police service.
Peter was appointed Chief Executive of the IWF in April 2002 and has led the organisation's expansion from a membership base of just fifteen companies to over ninety, a tripling of its income and the conversion from not-for-profit to charitable status. He has overseen major governance and role and remit reviews and a recent modernisation of the IWF's Board, stakeholder and consultation structures. He continues to foster the extensive partnerships and organisational integrity on which the success of the IWF relies and is presently engaged in developing the IWF's new three-year strategic plan.
He is a member of the Executive Board of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety and a National Internet Crime Forum. He was a member of the Home Secretary's Task Force on the Protection of Children on the Internet until it was replaced by the new UK Council for Child Internet Safety. He chaired a national Search Engine Working Group on behalf of the Government which culminated in the publication of a good practice guide for search providers and consumers. He regularly presents at events relating to illegal online content and frequently speaks to the media at home and abroad.
Peter was awarded the OBE in the Queen's 2008 New Years Honour's list for services to Children and Families.
Whether or not it is funded as an independent charity, the Powers That Be very definitely have a hand in IWF sockpuppetry. As far as I can see the only differences between this approach to the IWF and the directly govt funded approach are a) the govt don't have to pay for it, because they can just lean on the ISPs to get 'donations', and b) a complete, total lack of accountability. The govt pretty much forced the creation of the IWF in the first place by threatening to raid ISPs...
I think Travolta would be deeply upset if you suggested that Battle Field Earth misrepresented 'the Tech'.
The kind authored by LRH, that is.
Re:Nope. Never.
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I thought it had already been done - Cryptonomicon is about as technically rich as any fiction could ever be without being marketable as a sleep aid. Not perfect, but it surely counts in the 'what if someone who grokked the culture and understood the tech wrote something' category.
Or possibly... there are two different sets of skills?
FWIW what I meant was that very minor projects with no deadline and no deliverables tend not to count - not that academic projects are irrelevant. Since you brought it up, as an academic I have a lot of respect for 'academic' programming - but I do not kid myself that the priorities are the same as they are in business. On the whole, they aren't.
Business: must be completed on or near deadline, can be shoddy but generally passes through QA.
Academia: take approximately as long as you need, though might be a good idea to catch a paper deadline, and of course it would be a good idea to have something to show by the end of your project funding. QA is rare though not unheard of. Depending on where in academia, technical innovation may count for a lot, or for nothing at all.
That's why I said it depended what the project was. Some people learn a heck of a lot through open source project development. Others don't. Some people get all the relevant skills in an academic environment. Others don't. Heck, some people And that is why it is dependent on what the project is, and what the role of the individual in the project was.
I know... it's so arrogant of me to treat individual projects on their own merits.
This may be excessively cynical, but I regularly get these studies quoted at me and have come to believe that, whilst there is clearly sanity in reducing energy usage as far as possible without impairing needed performance, there is also a couple of other motivations driving much of this stuff. One is the fact that, like it or not, this sort of thing attracts funding, and another is the overwhelming urge to demonstrate that you're a nice PC green believer in saving the planet.
The problem is, as you say, that many of these studies generate numbers that are of little relevance to the real world and are designed more to produce publicity and hence help push relatively meaningless initiatives than to highlight any real potential for improvement. Now I'm off to boil the kettle -- and if they don't like it, they can build and sell a more efficient means of heating water.
The lack of showing responsibility by not doing something is a turn-off.
I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind this. How does not working show a lack of responsibility?
If I must work under someone else then I might as well make sure I will enjoy what I do, and that will benefit my employer as much as it does me. I don't care if it takes 5 days or 5 months to find such a position.
Not answering for the GP, but I have the same reaction as him/her about the 'not working', and so maybe this is somewhat useful.
It doesn't bother me if you're working and being paid for something or whether you're doing it for the love of it, but either way you should be able to explain what you have spent the last five months doing. If you've been doing something that makes you money and yet has nothing to do with the job you're applying for it tells me that you're able to get out of bed and go in to work even though you don't especially love the job that you're doing. If you can be somewhat civil about the job that you're doing - perhaps you don't love it, but if you can say anything positive about the experience - then that tells me that you won't be pitching a fit as soon as I first ask you to do something that, for whatever reason, isn't your heart's desire.
Somebody has to do the boring bits, and a person with mediocre talent but great timekeeping and sufficient application to do them is going to be more useful to me than a person who could do the best job that I've ever seen, but has decided not to bother because he/she thinks it's not worth doing.
If, on the other hand, a person can explain to me what other productive things he or she has been doing when jobless it isn't going to be a problem to me that there was no money involved. I see all of 'volunteer work', 'completed my butterfly collection', 'I trained, got sponsorship and ran a marathon' and 'I've been working in Starbucks' as fine. Just not 'I did nothing and lived off the state/my GF/my parents, because I don't have to do anything and I didn't fancy any of the options'... it makes the job applicant sound passive.
I'm going to have to third/fourth/fifth (depending on comment lag) the 'Get a job whilst you're still in school, experience counts' viewpoint. It really does help. And if you find yourself jobless even temporarily, make sure you do something with the time. Ideally, that would be the internship that has been mentioned here, but sometimes it'll have to be even less formal than that - this is where networking comes in. Unpaid/very minimally paid work on something isn't as great a CV bullet as an actual job but it is a lot easier to come by. Any connections that you have may come in useful; any college professors/researchers you might know from your university career may be able to provide you with something, although they're less likely to be able to pay you.
Open source code may arguably count in this, but it's very dependent on what the project is. If I'm hiring I generally look for something that I can find, download and see working. If, like so many projects, it turns out to be an itch that got scratched and then immediately placed on line with no testing or docs, I'd be impressed that it was placed online at all but wouldn't rank it very highly as experience. If on the other hand I can see evidence of what you did during your work on the project I might rank it somewhat higher, assuming HR ever let me see the CV (they have their own viewpoint on what 'experience' means).
I know this sounds obvious but it's very important to actually get around to applying, to do a little research before the interview, and to turn up to job interviews when the date has been agreed. Last hiring session I went on, only half of the people I invited for interview turned up. One of those who didn't emailed and apologised, so I sent him another interview date that he failed to meet either, which was facepalm-worthy and rather sad... two of those that I did interview hadn't bothered to look up the software packages mentioned by name in the original advert. And that was in the midst of the credit crunch.
Good luck to the OP and to all in their position, and if you do end up medium to long-term unemployed my advice to you is to keep busy and make sure you keep using your skills and abilities, find something you want to work on - I went back to studying when jobless after the dot-com boom, and one friend of mine wrote a book whilst unemployed! Also, get out of the house on a regular basis, even if it's only to yoga class or something. Unemployment is a nasty state if you let it get you down and is very likely to leave you feeling depressed and worthless (for no good reason - unemployment can happen to anybody), so keep your eyes open for that and find strategies to keep your spirits up.
Yup. Cancelled my Virgin broadband account recently, and it took about fifteen minutes to get through the laundry list of reasons. The staff member who dealt with the cancellation agreed with more or less every point on it, too. Finally he admitted that two-thirds of the staff had moved, mostly to Be.
Funny thing, apparently they've actually given up on Phorm due to customer complaints, have reversed their policy of making customers pay to report faults due to customer complaints, etc. The problem of course is that they didn't get around to reporting this to their customers, who continue to quit in droves. That said, it was their broadband limits that caused me to finally give up on them; they have incredibly low download limits at various times of the day. On one occasion I made the mistake of leaving streamed video turned on throughout the afternoon and they throttled the connection down to 'cannot even read email'.
In short, Virgin are total arseholes and Richard Branson needs a new brand name. This usage has somehow managed to tarnish the name even more than Virgin trains, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself.
"I would be willing to go out on a limb and say the majority of jewelery being cut off digits is more likely due to tissue swelling, from things like diabetes or allergic reactions."
I don't know if this is statistically accurate, but it makes sense to me. I once cut off my own ring with a pair of pliers at two in the morning after an inconvenient and rapid allergic reaction. This was in accordance with the policy that when a finger goes cold and blue and ceases responding to commands, the consequences of ignoring the problem are probably more expensive than the cost of repairing a ring. Since then I've been a bit thoughtful about wearing stuff that isn't either a) made of something fairly soft/hollow/whatever, b) relatively thin or c) sized a little bit large. Also, it's good to keep some pliers somewhere you can find them. The better the cutters, the less mashed the ring will be and the more likely you are to be able to get it fixed afterwards. If the ring is plated or has a design that goes all the way around the ring or whatever then the reconstruction is going to be more problematic.
Most people know by adulthood whether they're prone to sudden allergic reactions or not, but it's worth doing a few risk calculations, especially if the ring is intended to be worn every day.
There' s a picture on this web site, ie. this one. It's somewhat disappointing since it's more realistic to say they built a motorised platform, and stuck an office chair on it.
There is also a side-note describing the first German championship in office chair running, which took place in April. The paper also provide a set of increasingly disturbing images of hulking male participants dressed in various pink fluffy bunny type outfits draped in a variety of poses across office chairs... Apparently the motorised approach was not permitted during the championship, although entrants were allowed to customise their chairs with handlebars.
give away any of our rights to a soulless corporation (oxymoron?), and had a difficult, frustrating, and at the same time fabulous time doing so.
Small point of definition - an oxymoron is a combination of opposites, like 'Microsoft Works' and 'Military Intelligence'. A 'soulless corporation', on the other hand, is a combination of pretty similar terms. An oxymoron in which 'soulless' was better used might be 'soulless immortal', or if you are given to foul puns, 'soulless flip-flops'. What you have in 'soulless corporation' is in fact a tautology, an unnecessary repetition of meaning.
Sorry. I'm not usually an, um, definition nazi. And I'm on my third beer, so I may easily be wrong.
Perhaps your prof was under the assumption that some/many of you would like to continue as postgraduates, in which case LaTeX is very useful indeed. From your opinion of the academic articles that you have read I guess that this is not terribly likely, but the AC is right that if you had wanted to continue in academia, or indeed if you had a long final report to write or similar, you would have likely found some knowledge of LaTeX very useful. Most of the major comp sci conferences prefer articles to be written using LaTeX and provide templates for this purpose, though some are kind enough to provide equivalent templates in MS Word that are nearly as effective, except that they are generally a pain in the backside to use because Word has its own ideas about everything.
Still, as you say, you don't write documents and it is not a useful skill for you, which is fair enough. But it is a skill that could usefully be taught as part of a degree in CS, or physics, or other science in which LaTeX is widely used, so I can understand why your professor might have come to the conclusion that it is a reasonable thing to expect.
Nine years ago my mobile phone had a WAP browser in it. It wasn't a full Web browser, true, but we all knew what the aim was... and speaking of phones with a touch screen, in 1999 I was working at a major telecommunications company on a phone which, though it had a full set of normal controls also, could be driven purely via the touch screen. So, not the stuff of science fiction. OTOH the product failed miserably for various reasons, but this is hardly the point. Equally, ten years ago I had Linux on my desktop, and there was nothing very unusual about that.
True about the $200 desktop, though.
The point I'm making I guess is that things realistically separate out into the stuff of SF and the stuff of 'too expensive, too bulky, too impractical, too slow'. Costs adjust as things change, electronics gets more compact, battery technology improves. But that doesn't mean that they were unimaginable or seemed impossible, although it may have seemed like that from the viewpoint of the general public. It just means that there were engineering problems that made the product prohibitively expensive or difficult. Your description just makes it sound a bit as though we are living today with kit that seems like magic because, 10 years ago, we would never have believed it could exist, and I just don't think that is the case. It's more of a progression than a series of breakthroughs - with rare exceptions, the breakthroughs happen in marketing. The rest is more or less incremental.
Flew into Belfast instead last week because of this... when you're inconvenienced by technology it is very calming to know that what caused it was a real honest to goodness fuck-up, rather than a much less interesting case of human error:-)
I was taught that you could in general analytically work out whether the verbs were 'être' or 'avoir' by asking, in the intended sentence context:
What does/did the person [verb]?
eg. What does/did the person buy? - Avoir, because it makes some kind of sense.
What does/did the person go/born/fall? What? Must be être.
The heuristic has a good enough success rate to be worth recalling. When it fails it is generally though not always because the sentence context is not understood... and this mnemonic is, now that I think about it, just an easy way of making use of the property you note (that the verbs are intransitive). You're absolutely right that this is the important property - or in fact I think it's the somewhat related passive vs active voice in French. Take for example 'je suis descendu par l'escalier', approximately, I went downstairs using the stairs. If you go down the stairs specifically, it apparently becomes 'j'ai descendu l'escalier', I descended the stairs (what does/did the person descend? the stairs). I understand that there are also some very subtle cases of 'etre' vs 'avoir' out there as well. In some cases the distinction is really stylistic and nuanced, which is just what one needs when trying to learn a foreign language in finite time:-)
I agree. Unfortunately my employers have suddenly become worried about our carbon footprint to the extent that apparently they are happier with the idea of spending a lot to have an employee sit on a train for an entire day, than spending far less to have an employee hanging around at an airport for three hours.
One might think that this policy is nothing short of inhumane... but I couldn't possibly comment.
Slashdot Mirror
He also looks good in a Ming The Merciless cloak (this is the clip in which he declares himself the new Galactic Overlord):
http://www.videosift.com/video/Stephen-Becomes-Scientology-s-Galactic-Overlord
You're slightly wrong - in fact some rough numbers are available (for those who read space.com, anyway):
http://www.space.com/entertainment/090305-colbert-space-station.html
This marks only the second time that NASA has sought public input for naming a piece of U.S. space station hardware. The Harmony module was named by 2,200 students who entered NASA's naming contest for Node 2. By contrast, 169,000 people have voted online at NASA's naming contest site so far.
The NASA-chosen name Serenity, which shares the name of a spaceship in the cult favorite television series "Firefly", continues to maintain a huge lead with more than 66,000 votes, according to NASA. But a surge of votes has given Colbert 29,000 in just two days, enough for second overall. The trailing vote-getters include Xenu (9,200), Earthrise (4,200), Legacy (3,500) and Venture (3,200).
Amen. Seriously.
The urge for the computer industry to reinvent itself every ten or twenty years ('new words for old! new words for old!') is presumably something to do with the urge to foster that appealing sense of mystique that means that businesses are never quite sure what, if anything, they're spending money on. But the Cloud is a particularly silly example.
The ownership of metadata in general has been fought out in various arenas -- who owns what, who gets to transform it and all that are discussed to death in the area of library science, for example. The net result is usually that we all argue ourselves to a standstill and then some damn pragmatist just turns up and solves the whole thing by ignoring the philosophical side of the issue entirely and building stuff that works. Search engines are the classic example of this.
If there's one piece of advice that the cloud people should keep in mind (and many do - not their fault that they're infested with bloggers) it's don't spend your life farting around with airy fairy questions and delightfully fuzzy nomenclature, and do something useful - leave the pseudo-philosophy to the bloggers. Sorry - but I work on the edge of this industry and there are times, usually in front of the tenth powerpoint presentation of the week, that beating the speaker to death with the conference goodie bag seems like the only ethical option.
Frankly the summary presents the research far more pretentiously than I hope PARC would prefer. It's a little like saying
"In order to go to the corner shop for a bottle of milk, we negotiated release of planned security mechanisms on the warm/cool air boundary designed to limit unauthorised perambulation, thus obtaining access to the pedestrian displacement area."
That said, the researchers according to TFA apparently did 'spend much of 2008 getting access to live data' - so apparently they are using something other than the open access downloads. It makes me wonder why they didn't just use the recent changes facility from each page, but undoubtedly they have their reasons.
TFA is worth a quick read, and suggests that this Wikidashboard business is an interesting example of the general genre of 'presenting some facet of edit data in a concise and accessible way', along with stuff like WikiScanner, recent change statistics and so on, but it doesn't seem that revolutionary, really.
I've had a lot of Nokia phones in the past (brand loyalty or laziness - you decide) and only ever saw two types of power adaptor in use - ever since the 'matrix phone' (7110) in 1999, each phone had the same plug, all the way up to the 9500. It wasn't til I got an N70 that a new plug appeared - same sort of cylindrical plug but narrower diameter. They seem to have stuck with that since, as far as I can tell, and indeed they did provide an adapter so the older chargers could be used with the new phones.
The only problem with using the charger I got for the 7110 for my newest bits of Nokia kit is that the these days the chargers they give out are allegedly 'fast' chargers, which I assume means that more power can be drawn from them to charge the battery faster - so the 7110's charger is the modern-day power supply equivalent of a 1x CD-RW (I've got one of those, too. It's actually got a caddy loading system. Uphill. In the snow. Both ways)
Yeah, I agree with you about the skill level required to install Slackware. I first installed Slackware in the mid-90s as a kid, and it was not a very hard process. My main problem really was what to do with it once I got it installed. Then I discovered hangman, and from that point on I was hooked. How hooked? Well, I'm typing this on Slackware...
I did try SUSE, but threw the disk out in a fit of nerd rage once I realised that it needed more memory than my laptop had (8 megs at the time) just to install. And Red Hat, which was at a funny stage in its development and committed a form of complicated suicide after a couple of months due to some error or other in an init script. I also tried Mandrake, liked it, but... somehow I always seem to go back to Slack.
Yes, an independent charity whose CEO is an ex-police officer.
http://www.iwf.org.uk/media/page.66.200.htm
No offence to them but at best it's a quango. Robbins joined fresh from his police career the year that Malcolm Hutty, executive director of the Campaign Against Censorship of the Internet, and two other members resigned. At the same time that the IWF came up with its 'Tough New Approach', in fact, curiously enough.
Whether or not it is funded as an independent charity, the Powers That Be very definitely have a hand in IWF sockpuppetry. As far as I can see the only differences between this approach to the IWF and the directly govt funded approach are a) the govt don't have to pay for it, because they can just lean on the ISPs to get 'donations', and b) a complete, total lack of accountability. The govt pretty much forced the creation of the IWF in the first place by threatening to raid ISPs...
I think Travolta would be deeply upset if you suggested that Battle Field Earth misrepresented 'the Tech'.
The kind authored by LRH, that is.
I thought it had already been done - Cryptonomicon is about as technically rich as any fiction could ever be without being marketable as a sleep aid. Not perfect, but it surely counts in the 'what if someone who grokked the culture and understood the tech wrote something' category.
LOL yeah, employers are incredibly arrogant.
Or possibly... there are two different sets of skills?
FWIW what I meant was that very minor projects with no deadline and no deliverables tend not to count - not that academic projects are irrelevant. Since you brought it up, as an academic I have a lot of respect for 'academic' programming - but I do not kid myself that the priorities are the same as they are in business. On the whole, they aren't.
Business: must be completed on or near deadline, can be shoddy but generally passes through QA.
Academia: take approximately as long as you need, though might be a good idea to catch a paper deadline, and of course it would be a good idea to have something to show by the end of your project funding. QA is rare though not unheard of. Depending on where in academia, technical innovation may count for a lot, or for nothing at all.
That's why I said it depended what the project was. Some people learn a heck of a lot through open source project development. Others don't. Some people get all the relevant skills in an academic environment. Others don't. Heck, some people And that is why it is dependent on what the project is, and what the role of the individual in the project was.
I know... it's so arrogant of me to treat individual projects on their own merits.
This may be excessively cynical, but I regularly get these studies quoted at me and have come to believe that, whilst there is clearly sanity in reducing energy usage as far as possible without impairing needed performance, there is also a couple of other motivations driving much of this stuff. One is the fact that, like it or not, this sort of thing attracts funding, and another is the overwhelming urge to demonstrate that you're a nice PC green believer in saving the planet.
The problem is, as you say, that many of these studies generate numbers that are of little relevance to the real world and are designed more to produce publicity and hence help push relatively meaningless initiatives than to highlight any real potential for improvement. Now I'm off to boil the kettle -- and if they don't like it, they can build and sell a more efficient means of heating water.
The lack of showing responsibility by not doing something is a turn-off.
I'd be interested to hear the reasoning behind this. How does not working show a lack of responsibility?
If I must work under someone else then I might as well make sure I will enjoy what I do, and that will benefit my employer as much as it does me. I don't care if it takes 5 days or 5 months to find such a position.
Not answering for the GP, but I have the same reaction as him/her about the 'not working', and so maybe this is somewhat useful.
It doesn't bother me if you're working and being paid for something or whether you're doing it for the love of it, but either way you should be able to explain what you have spent the last five months doing. If you've been doing something that makes you money and yet has nothing to do with the job you're applying for it tells me that you're able to get out of bed and go in to work even though you don't especially love the job that you're doing. If you can be somewhat civil about the job that you're doing - perhaps you don't love it, but if you can say anything positive about the experience - then that tells me that you won't be pitching a fit as soon as I first ask you to do something that, for whatever reason, isn't your heart's desire.
Somebody has to do the boring bits, and a person with mediocre talent but great timekeeping and sufficient application to do them is going to be more useful to me than a person who could do the best job that I've ever seen, but has decided not to bother because he/she thinks it's not worth doing.
If, on the other hand, a person can explain to me what other productive things he or she has been doing when jobless it isn't going to be a problem to me that there was no money involved. I see all of 'volunteer work', 'completed my butterfly collection', 'I trained, got sponsorship and ran a marathon' and 'I've been working in Starbucks' as fine. Just not 'I did nothing and lived off the state/my GF/my parents, because I don't have to do anything and I didn't fancy any of the options'... it makes the job applicant sound passive.
I'm going to have to third/fourth/fifth (depending on comment lag) the 'Get a job whilst you're still in school, experience counts' viewpoint. It really does help. And if you find yourself jobless even temporarily, make sure you do something with the time. Ideally, that would be the internship that has been mentioned here, but sometimes it'll have to be even less formal than that - this is where networking comes in. Unpaid/very minimally paid work on something isn't as great a CV bullet as an actual job but it is a lot easier to come by. Any connections that you have may come in useful; any college professors/researchers you might know from your university career may be able to provide you with something, although they're less likely to be able to pay you.
Open source code may arguably count in this, but it's very dependent on what the project is. If I'm hiring I generally look for something that I can find, download and see working. If, like so many projects, it turns out to be an itch that got scratched and then immediately placed on line with no testing or docs, I'd be impressed that it was placed online at all but wouldn't rank it very highly as experience. If on the other hand I can see evidence of what you did during your work on the project I might rank it somewhat higher, assuming HR ever let me see the CV (they have their own viewpoint on what 'experience' means).
I know this sounds obvious but it's very important to actually get around to applying, to do a little research before the interview, and to turn up to job interviews when the date has been agreed. Last hiring session I went on, only half of the people I invited for interview turned up. One of those who didn't emailed and apologised, so I sent him another interview date that he failed to meet either, which was facepalm-worthy and rather sad... two of those that I did interview hadn't bothered to look up the software packages mentioned by name in the original advert. And that was in the midst of the credit crunch.
Good luck to the OP and to all in their position, and if you do end up medium to long-term unemployed my advice to you is to keep busy and make sure you keep using your skills and abilities, find something you want to work on - I went back to studying when jobless after the dot-com boom, and one friend of mine wrote a book whilst unemployed! Also, get out of the house on a regular basis, even if it's only to yoga class or something. Unemployment is a nasty state if you let it get you down and is very likely to leave you feeling depressed and worthless (for no good reason - unemployment can happen to anybody), so keep your eyes open for that and find strategies to keep your spirits up.
This one, Einstein?
As with other words such as 'Apple' and 'Windows'?
Yup. Cancelled my Virgin broadband account recently, and it took about fifteen minutes to get through the laundry list of reasons. The staff member who dealt with the cancellation agreed with more or less every point on it, too. Finally he admitted that two-thirds of the staff had moved, mostly to Be.
Funny thing, apparently they've actually given up on Phorm due to customer complaints, have reversed their policy of making customers pay to report faults due to customer complaints, etc. The problem of course is that they didn't get around to reporting this to their customers, who continue to quit in droves. That said, it was their broadband limits that caused me to finally give up on them; they have incredibly low download limits at various times of the day. On one occasion I made the mistake of leaving streamed video turned on throughout the afternoon and they throttled the connection down to 'cannot even read email'.
In short, Virgin are total arseholes and Richard Branson needs a new brand name. This usage has somehow managed to tarnish the name even more than Virgin trains, which is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself.
"I would be willing to go out on a limb and say the majority of jewelery being cut off digits is more likely due to tissue swelling, from things like diabetes or allergic reactions."
I don't know if this is statistically accurate, but it makes sense to me. I once cut off my own ring with a pair of pliers at two in the morning after an inconvenient and rapid allergic reaction. This was in accordance with the policy that when a finger goes cold and blue and ceases responding to commands, the consequences of ignoring the problem are probably more expensive than the cost of repairing a ring. Since then I've been a bit thoughtful about wearing stuff that isn't either a) made of something fairly soft/hollow/whatever, b) relatively thin or c) sized a little bit large. Also, it's good to keep some pliers somewhere you can find them. The better the cutters, the less mashed the ring will be and the more likely you are to be able to get it fixed afterwards. If the ring is plated or has a design that goes all the way around the ring or whatever then the reconstruction is going to be more problematic.
Most people know by adulthood whether they're prone to sudden allergic reactions or not, but it's worth doing a few risk calculations, especially if the ring is intended to be worn every day.
There' s a picture on this web site, ie. this one.
It's somewhat disappointing since it's more realistic to say they built a motorised platform, and stuck an office chair on it.
There is also a side-note describing the first German championship in office chair running, which took place in April. The paper also provide a set of increasingly disturbing images of hulking male participants dressed in various pink fluffy bunny type outfits draped in a variety of poses across office chairs... Apparently the motorised approach was not permitted during the championship, although entrants were allowed to customise their chairs with handlebars.
Oh yeah, and FWIW: I meant to add that your pathway to not-exactly-fame and-fortune actually sounds like rather more fun than the alternatives.
give away any of our rights to a soulless corporation (oxymoron?), and had a difficult, frustrating, and at the same time fabulous time doing so.
Small point of definition - an oxymoron is a combination of opposites, like 'Microsoft Works' and 'Military Intelligence'. A 'soulless corporation', on the other hand, is a combination of pretty similar terms. An oxymoron in which 'soulless' was better used might be 'soulless immortal', or if you are given to foul puns, 'soulless flip-flops'. What you have in 'soulless corporation' is in fact a tautology, an unnecessary repetition of meaning.
Sorry. I'm not usually an, um, definition nazi. And I'm on my third beer, so I may easily be wrong.
Perhaps your prof was under the assumption that some/many of you would like to continue as postgraduates, in which case LaTeX is very useful indeed. From your opinion of the academic articles that you have read I guess that this is not terribly likely, but the AC is right that if you had wanted to continue in academia, or indeed if you had a long final report to write or similar, you would have likely found some knowledge of LaTeX very useful. Most of the major comp sci conferences prefer articles to be written using LaTeX and provide templates for this purpose, though some are kind enough to provide equivalent templates in MS Word that are nearly as effective, except that they are generally a pain in the backside to use because Word has its own ideas about everything.
Still, as you say, you don't write documents and it is not a useful skill for you, which is fair enough. But it is a skill that could usefully be taught as part of a degree in CS, or physics, or other science in which LaTeX is widely used, so I can understand why your professor might have come to the conclusion that it is a reasonable thing to expect.
Wot? Nah.
Nine years ago my mobile phone had a WAP browser in it. It wasn't a full Web browser, true, but we all knew what the aim was... and speaking of phones with a touch screen, in 1999 I was working at a major telecommunications company on a phone which, though it had a full set of normal controls also, could be driven purely via the touch screen. So, not the stuff of science fiction. OTOH the product failed miserably for various reasons, but this is hardly the point. Equally, ten years ago I had Linux on my desktop, and there was nothing very unusual about that.
True about the $200 desktop, though.
The point I'm making I guess is that things realistically separate out into the stuff of SF and the stuff of 'too expensive, too bulky, too impractical, too slow'. Costs adjust as things change, electronics gets more compact, battery technology improves. But that doesn't mean that they were unimaginable or seemed impossible, although it may have seemed like that from the viewpoint of the general public. It just means that there were engineering problems that made the product prohibitively expensive or difficult. Your description just makes it sound a bit as though we are living today with kit that seems like magic because, 10 years ago, we would never have believed it could exist, and I just don't think that is the case. It's more of a progression than a series of breakthroughs - with rare exceptions, the breakthroughs happen in marketing. The rest is more or less incremental.
Flew into Belfast instead last week because of this... when you're inconvenienced by technology it is very calming to know that what caused it was a real honest to goodness fuck-up, rather than a much less interesting case of human error :-)
I was taught that you could in general analytically work out whether the verbs were 'être' or 'avoir' by asking, in the intended sentence context:
What does/did the person [verb]?
eg. What does/did the person buy? - Avoir, because it makes some kind of sense.
What does/did the person go/born/fall? What? Must be être.
The heuristic has a good enough success rate to be worth recalling. When it fails it is generally though not always because the sentence context is not understood... and this mnemonic is, now that I think about it, just an easy way of making use of the property you note (that the verbs are intransitive). You're absolutely right that this is the important property - or in fact I think it's the somewhat related passive vs active voice in French. Take for example 'je suis descendu par l'escalier', approximately, I went downstairs using the stairs. If you go down the stairs specifically, it apparently becomes 'j'ai descendu l'escalier', I descended the stairs (what does/did the person descend? the stairs). I understand that there are also some very subtle cases of 'etre' vs 'avoir' out there as well. In some cases the distinction is really stylistic and nuanced, which is just what one needs when trying to learn a foreign language in finite time :-)
A decent page on the topic: http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/grammar/avoir_or_etre.shtml
There's a page linked on from there that describes some subtle cases, too.
But I digress.
I agree. Unfortunately my employers have suddenly become worried about our carbon footprint to the extent that apparently they are happier with the idea of spending a lot to have an employee sit on a train for an entire day, than spending far less to have an employee hanging around at an airport for three hours.
One might think that this policy is nothing short of inhumane... but I couldn't possibly comment.