I guess I'm just too honest, I really hate lying in that way. In many ways I think this is a serious hindrance when it comes to finding a good job, other candidates will gladly say they're experts at whatever the company wants them to be experts at and I'll tell the truth, guess who gets the interview/job?
But honestly, I'm happier knowing I'm not where I am because of my own dishonesty.
Anyway, any place that looks at those certifications is likely to eat up anything you tell them anyway, because they usually don't know any better. A place where they ask you technical questions usually won't care where you learned the stuff, as long as you know your shit. I prefer the later type of setting myself.
Well, it's not that these courses are useless, it's just that most of the stuff in them is stuff I knew how to do back in the late 90's (and which are apparently considered advanced UNIX skills these days, like building apache+mysql+php on your own instead of running Synaptic and clicking on Apache, MySQL and PHP followed by the "install selected packages" button). So I'm basically taking these courses so that potential employers will know I'm not lying about my skills.
Unfortunately there are a lot of places where that kind of reasoning is applied by almost all HR drones and hiring managers. That's the reason for me going back to school to take a couple of "mickey mouse" courses, to be able to put stuff like "basic linux administration skills" on my resumé without having every company I apply for a job with dismiss me as "another loser who downloaded and installed Ubuntu and now thinks he's God's gift to UNIX administration" even though I state quite clearly that I have used various UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems since 1997.
Open Source experience outside of "real" jobs means a lot less these days with all the people who think they're experts because they managed to install Ubuntu (I was actually told at an interview that they used to consider "I use Linux at home" as a good thing but in the last couple of years they've started interpreting it as a sign of Dunning-Kruger effect).
So patriotism (there go the Olympics), the aspect of female emancipation that insists that women should be proud to be women etc. are all right out? Is gay pride still OK or are you in the camp of people who theorise that you can't help being a homosexual, because if you are, draw your conclusions.
Well, I've long thought that patriotism is something that is really only useful when you want to manipulate people into blowing other people up. And women should be proud of themselves, as individuals and not because they happened to be born with a vagina instead of a penis.
I feel the same way about gay pride, be who you are and be proud of those accomplishments of yours that you feel you have the most reason to be proud of instead of being proud of some random thing about yourself that you have little to no influence over.
Or do these "proud" people think I should be proud of the fact that I'm tall? that I'm blonde? that I'm male? that I have a high IQ? Isn't it better that I'm proud of things I've accomplished and things about myself that I have influence over?
/Mikael (yes, I think that about 90% of the things people are proud of are things that they have no reason to be proud of)
Yeah, my immediate thought was that there's probably some "clever" way of changing salaries like that it only allows changes with certain intervals, so that the system is meant to work something like:
All employees start with current pay (today)
Standard negotiations for pay raises take place
Pay raises are input into the system
New year/end of quarter/whatever rolls around and the system automatically checks for registered changes to make
System changes the pay for everyone who gets a pay raise/cut.
System goes back to waiting for the next date at which it is programmed to check for raises.
GOTO 1
I've had to deal with systems that behave this way, doing batch runs nightly, weekly, monthly or yearly. So if you changed something it wouldn't actually be registered until the 1st of the next month. Probably a good idea once upon a time when the system was running on hardware that wouldn't have the performance to handle "real-time" updates.
No computer should be so hard to figure out that surfing the net should be a dangerous activity...this is not the fault of users, it is the fault of companies that make software that is 'good enough'
A computer is a general purpose device, if your car was also capable of painting your house, digging drainage ditches and flying to the moon then it would require a certain amount of understanding to operate.
You mean other than the fact that it is growing to be the #1 way of getting information, communicating with others and you pretty much can't be employed unless you keep up with the latest systems? Yeah...no good reason to use one.
Clearly you have a pretty narrow view of the world, I worked in tech support, customer services and helpdesk for a total of about 2.5 years and there are a lot of people out there who essentially use their computer+internet connection to email pictures of their dog to their friends or who use the same piece of software all day every day at work yet they need to call helpdesk at least once a week because they someone forgot where the huge Print button was and got scared. These are people that for the most part don't need to use a computer or the internet, at least not in the sense that one generally thinks of it, a specialised device for exactly what they want to do? Sure. A general-purpose computer? No.
Beyond that, I believe that folks that cannot figure out the social aspects of life should be removed from the human race because obviously they are too stupid to figure it out from their neural Bayesian algs....and even brute forcing it from simple rules like DON'T BE A FUCKING NERD doesn't work...well, obviously they are too stupid and need to be removed.
And here come the troll ad hominem attacks.
Having said this, I don't think you are any more broken than the people that you are railing against, but I do think you have just as many problems. Obviously, while they were learning to interact with each other, you were learning the command line. Maybe its time you put down the keyboard and go outside and look at your own advice from another perspective. I know, I know...it is hard to be an angsty teen (40-year old???) and realize that your snarkiness is just a protection mechanism to ensure that your sense of superiority is intact.
What would the problems I have be? I mean beside the fact that I'm bitter about how so many people seem to think they're entitled to be protected and babied and not have to learn anything?
Also, I have a rich social life, always had. But I also have always been interested in computers and electronics (among other things) and I make it a point to try to understand things that I use on a daily basis.
Interestingly enough both your guesses about my age missed the mark.
So why aren't cars made of rubber and only capable of going 20 km/h? Oh that's right, we've chosen to attempts to educate the idiots and force them to pass tests before being allowed to use a computer^Wcar on public roads
One of those "joke" ideas that would actually be kind of funny would be if in order to sign up with an ISP to get internet access you'd be required to pass a basic test that starts along the lines of "click the red square" and ends with "Is the computer in the picture: a) The box under the desk? b) The big thing with pictures on top of the desk? c) The thing on the desk that prints out text on papers?". it wouldn't even compare to the theoretical exam for getting a driver's license here in.se but I suspect the internet population would seriously decrease... (Yes, in Sweden you actually have to know how to diagnose simple problems with your car and know the names of the different parts. And yes, I miss the days when getting online wasn't something that any idiot could accomplish, sure there were idiots online but the vast hordes of drooling mouth-breathing morons were kept out)
I disagree, IMO one warning should be enough, if you're too stupid to figure out your computer then you should get rid of it. I'm serious, I've dealt with way too many users who had no good reason to use a computer to begin with and who clearly barely had the skills to understand directions along the lines of "Now move your mouse pointer to the bottom left corner of the screen and LEFT-click the big button with a flag and the text Start on it.", this is also serious, I have dealt with people who were otherwise intelligent productive members of society who really couldn't figure things out beyond the start menu and "The big blue 'e' gets me my intarwebs", these people should not be protected from themselves.
Sounds like just about every large ISP I've had the "pleasure" of working with. A small ISP's president will go issue a press release saying "Lightning took out two of our DSLAMs last night but it will be fixed ASAP", they'll most likely also record an automated message informing customers calling tech support about this. A large ISP OTOH will most likely keep quiet as long as possible, then issue a small notice on their website stating "Some of our customers are currently experiencing technical difficulties, our intarweb experts are investigating the problem and hope to have it fixed soon" and no information to customers calling tech support other than "There are 173 customers ahead of you, the wait time is 2 hours and 12 minutes".
/Mikael
Re:But what comes next?
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
Don't you have a sense of adventure? Sending a hundred probes to accurately measure everything you can imagine about the moon and its surface just isn't the same as actually setting foot on the moon. Sending a probe to a distant star and taking pictures of the little green men living there just wouldn't be very fun, would it? Would anyone watch Star Trek if it was about sending thousands of probes while the humans all sat in front of screens back on Earth?
/Mikael
Re:But what comes next?
on
NASA Turns 50
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you think that's a lot then I don't think you want to know how much money the US is spending on its military.
The question I want answered when you say that Word 2008 is better at typesetting math than LaTeX is "does it still completely mangle the rest of the document unless you spend hours tweaking it after writing your document?". Once, in college, I tried writing a lab report in MS Word and I've tried writing other documents in it at work but I always end up feeling like I'm mud-wrestling with a pig, the damn thing seems to enjoy screwing up the document I'm working on...
If I make a drug that saves the lives of all cancer patients, 100% success rate, but can't market my way out of a box, I save no one.
If Joe makes a drug that only saves half the people, but he can market like no one else, he saves millions of lives - and makes enough money to buy my product, and market it as well.
The problem with this is of course when you and Joe create your drugs at the same time and part of the reason (or perhaps entirely the reason) for why your product isn't selling is because Joe is better at marketing than you are. You had a clearly superior product but Joe simply managed to convince people that his product was better (or the only available drug on the market, just like there are quite a few Windows users out there who still seem to think that you can't have a computer without Windows on it, didn't mean to turn this into an anti-Windows flame but it''s a good example of how successful marketing can be at making people believe something that isn't even remotely true).
Of course, the problem with Plan 9 is that even on the most generic of modern hardware it seems to be quite moody, and don't even think of dual-booting it!
It does get bonus points for the arcane magic required to get the installer to boot though.:)
A similar profession that could make good use of this is tech support/helpdesk. Being able to leave a voice message to inform a user of the status of their trouble ticket without getting dragged into a lengthy conversation about how horrible the helpdesk is for not solving problems before the users have even noticed them. That way you could actually sit down and call back to those 30 or so users who filed trouble tickets yesterday without having to schedule 10 minutes per call when all you were going to do was tell them "We figured out your problem was that you were hitting the Save button instead of the Print button, the Print button is the one that has the text Print and a picture of a printer on it".
Are you kidding? "very slow 3g connections"? I guess you don't remember when 14.4 kbps modems were considered blazing fast because to me bringing up most websites in Safari on my iPhone 3G is very snappy unless I'm somewhere with bad coverage so that my phone has to resort to connecting using Edge.
Also, the user interface when using Safari on the iPhone 3G is vastly superior to anything else I've experienced on a cellphone, including a bunch of Opera-using ones. My last phone came with Opera and I really tried to like it but the UI made me want to smash my phone into little pieces....
While the first-gen iPhone may have been available in a handful of countries for a year it's not until now that it's readily available to a lot of people (there are lots of us who weren't too thrilled about having to jailbreak (and potentially brick) a non-3G phone).
So there isn't an SSH client then? Because as I mentioned in my post, I'm running the iPhone 3G and there is still no way to jailbreak the iPhone 3G...
Besides, an SSH client in the app store would be so much more convenient.
I too enjoy the simplicity of the app store and unless there is a very good reason to do so I will not jailbreak my iPhone 3G if/when it becomes possible.
The only thing that could really get me interested in jailbreaking my iPhone 3G right now would be if there was a way to jailbreak it and there was a free SSH client needed the phone to be jailbroken. But as there currently is no SSH client for the iPhone 3G at all then there is no point for me to care about jailbreaking.
I am hoping someone will release a free or cheap (and good) SSH client through the app store though.
Pretty much every Mac user I know has a large high-res monitor, but maybe that's because most mac users I know are techies or people who work with graphics.
The fullscreen thing is a different design philosophy, one that isn't based in a world where users are assumed to be so dumb that they're running their 256-bit quad-core 6GHz machine with a Geforce13900GTXS++ graphics card and a 42" LCD monitor in 800x600.
Basically, "maximize" is IMO a horrible legacy of the days when the average cheap-ass user had to run apps in full-screen mode to be able to be productive, these days there is no sane reason for just about any everyday app to run in fullscreen (why would you want Safari/Firefox or Mail.app running fullscreen on a 1920x1200 monitor?), and the few that have good reason to run in fullscreen generally have a "real" maximize button (like Maya).
It's simply the preferred default that apps don't just grab all available screen real estate.
The first three things I decided I wanted to find (and even purchase if there wasn't a free version available were:
SSH client - No dice, nothing that I can find by browsing and searching.
IRC client - Once again, nothing.
MSN Messenger/multi-protocol IM client - You got it, nothing, only an AIM client but no one I know uses AIM
Now, to my knowledge there is an ssh client available for first gen iPhones (jailbreaked) but despite this no one has bothered putting together a simple SSH client for the 3G iPhone?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'm just too honest, I really hate lying in that way. In many ways I think this is a serious hindrance when it comes to finding a good job, other candidates will gladly say they're experts at whatever the company wants them to be experts at and I'll tell the truth, guess who gets the interview/job?
But honestly, I'm happier knowing I'm not where I am because of my own dishonesty.
/Mikael
Anyway, any place that looks at those certifications is likely to eat up anything you tell them anyway, because they usually don't know any better. A place where they ask you technical questions usually won't care where you learned the stuff, as long as you know your shit. I prefer the later type of setting myself.
Well, it's not that these courses are useless, it's just that most of the stuff in them is stuff I knew how to do back in the late 90's (and which are apparently considered advanced UNIX skills these days, like building apache+mysql+php on your own instead of running Synaptic and clicking on Apache, MySQL and PHP followed by the "install selected packages" button). So I'm basically taking these courses so that potential employers will know I'm not lying about my skills.
/Mikael
Unfortunately there are a lot of places where that kind of reasoning is applied by almost all HR drones and hiring managers. That's the reason for me going back to school to take a couple of "mickey mouse" courses, to be able to put stuff like "basic linux administration skills" on my resumé without having every company I apply for a job with dismiss me as "another loser who downloaded and installed Ubuntu and now thinks he's God's gift to UNIX administration" even though I state quite clearly that I have used various UNIX-based and UNIX-like operating systems since 1997.
Open Source experience outside of "real" jobs means a lot less these days with all the people who think they're experts because they managed to install Ubuntu (I was actually told at an interview that they used to consider "I use Linux at home" as a good thing but in the last couple of years they've started interpreting it as a sign of Dunning-Kruger effect).
/Mikael
So patriotism (there go the Olympics), the aspect of female emancipation that insists that women should be proud to be women etc. are all right out? Is gay pride still OK or are you in the camp of people who theorise that you can't help being a homosexual, because if you are, draw your conclusions.
Well, I've long thought that patriotism is something that is really only useful when you want to manipulate people into blowing other people up. And women should be proud of themselves, as individuals and not because they happened to be born with a vagina instead of a penis.
I feel the same way about gay pride, be who you are and be proud of those accomplishments of yours that you feel you have the most reason to be proud of instead of being proud of some random thing about yourself that you have little to no influence over.
Or do these "proud" people think I should be proud of the fact that I'm tall? that I'm blonde? that I'm male? that I have a high IQ? Isn't it better that I'm proud of things I've accomplished and things about myself that I have influence over?
/Mikael (yes, I think that about 90% of the things people are proud of are things that they have no reason to be proud of)
Yeah, my immediate thought was that there's probably some "clever" way of changing salaries like that it only allows changes with certain intervals, so that the system is meant to work something like:
I've had to deal with systems that behave this way, doing batch runs nightly, weekly, monthly or yearly. So if you changed something it wouldn't actually be registered until the 1st of the next month. Probably a good idea once upon a time when the system was running on hardware that wouldn't have the performance to handle "real-time" updates.
/Mikael
A computer is a general purpose device, if your car was also capable of painting your house, digging drainage ditches and flying to the moon then it would require a certain amount of understanding to operate.
Clearly you have a pretty narrow view of the world, I worked in tech support, customer services and helpdesk for a total of about 2.5 years and there are a lot of people out there who essentially use their computer+internet connection to email pictures of their dog to their friends or who use the same piece of software all day every day at work yet they need to call helpdesk at least once a week because they someone forgot where the huge Print button was and got scared. These are people that for the most part don't need to use a computer or the internet, at least not in the sense that one generally thinks of it, a specialised device for exactly what they want to do? Sure. A general-purpose computer? No.
And here come the troll ad hominem attacks.
What would the problems I have be? I mean beside the fact that I'm bitter about how so many people seem to think they're entitled to be protected and babied and not have to learn anything?
Also, I have a rich social life, always had. But I also have always been interested in computers and electronics (among other things) and I make it a point to try to understand things that I use on a daily basis.
Interestingly enough both your guesses about my age missed the mark.
/Mikael
So why aren't cars made of rubber and only capable of going 20 km/h? Oh that's right, we've chosen to attempts to educate the idiots and force them to pass tests before being allowed to use a computer^Wcar on public roads
One of those "joke" ideas that would actually be kind of funny would be if in order to sign up with an ISP to get internet access you'd be required to pass a basic test that starts along the lines of "click the red square" and ends with "Is the computer in the picture: a) The box under the desk? b) The big thing with pictures on top of the desk? c) The thing on the desk that prints out text on papers?". it wouldn't even compare to the theoretical exam for getting a driver's license here in .se but I suspect the internet population would seriously decrease... (Yes, in Sweden you actually have to know how to diagnose simple problems with your car and know the names of the different parts. And yes, I miss the days when getting online wasn't something that any idiot could accomplish, sure there were idiots online but the vast hordes of drooling mouth-breathing morons were kept out)
/Mikael
I disagree, IMO one warning should be enough, if you're too stupid to figure out your computer then you should get rid of it. I'm serious, I've dealt with way too many users who had no good reason to use a computer to begin with and who clearly barely had the skills to understand directions along the lines of "Now move your mouse pointer to the bottom left corner of the screen and LEFT-click the big button with a flag and the text Start on it.", this is also serious, I have dealt with people who were otherwise intelligent productive members of society who really couldn't figure things out beyond the start menu and "The big blue 'e' gets me my intarwebs", these people should not be protected from themselves.
/Mikael
Sounds like just about every large ISP I've had the "pleasure" of working with. A small ISP's president will go issue a press release saying "Lightning took out two of our DSLAMs last night but it will be fixed ASAP", they'll most likely also record an automated message informing customers calling tech support about this. A large ISP OTOH will most likely keep quiet as long as possible, then issue a small notice on their website stating "Some of our customers are currently experiencing technical difficulties, our intarweb experts are investigating the problem and hope to have it fixed soon" and no information to customers calling tech support other than "There are 173 customers ahead of you, the wait time is 2 hours and 12 minutes".
/Mikael
Don't you have a sense of adventure? Sending a hundred probes to accurately measure everything you can imagine about the moon and its surface just isn't the same as actually setting foot on the moon. Sending a probe to a distant star and taking pictures of the little green men living there just wouldn't be very fun, would it? Would anyone watch Star Trek if it was about sending thousands of probes while the humans all sat in front of screens back on Earth?
/Mikael
If you think that's a lot then I don't think you want to know how much money the US is spending on its military.
/Mikael
It means he thinks that there aren't millions of non-US facebook users because he hasn't bothered to look.
/Mikael
The question I want answered when you say that Word 2008 is better at typesetting math than LaTeX is "does it still completely mangle the rest of the document unless you spend hours tweaking it after writing your document?". Once, in college, I tried writing a lab report in MS Word and I've tried writing other documents in it at work but I always end up feeling like I'm mud-wrestling with a pig, the damn thing seems to enjoy screwing up the document I'm working on...
/Mikael
The problem with this is of course when you and Joe create your drugs at the same time and part of the reason (or perhaps entirely the reason) for why your product isn't selling is because Joe is better at marketing than you are. You had a clearly superior product but Joe simply managed to convince people that his product was better (or the only available drug on the market, just like there are quite a few Windows users out there who still seem to think that you can't have a computer without Windows on it, didn't mean to turn this into an anti-Windows flame but it''s a good example of how successful marketing can be at making people believe something that isn't even remotely true).
/Mikael
Of course, the problem with Plan 9 is that even on the most generic of modern hardware it seems to be quite moody, and don't even think of dual-booting it!
It does get bonus points for the arcane magic required to get the installer to boot though. :)
/Mikael
A similar profession that could make good use of this is tech support/helpdesk. Being able to leave a voice message to inform a user of the status of their trouble ticket without getting dragged into a lengthy conversation about how horrible the helpdesk is for not solving problems before the users have even noticed them. That way you could actually sit down and call back to those 30 or so users who filed trouble tickets yesterday without having to schedule 10 minutes per call when all you were going to do was tell them "We figured out your problem was that you were hitting the Save button instead of the Print button, the Print button is the one that has the text Print and a picture of a printer on it".
/Mikael
Ah yes, I suppose I was a bit unclear, what I should have said was that there is no jailbreak available to the general public yet...
/Mikael
Are you kidding? "very slow 3g connections"? I guess you don't remember when 14.4 kbps modems were considered blazing fast because to me bringing up most websites in Safari on my iPhone 3G is very snappy unless I'm somewhere with bad coverage so that my phone has to resort to connecting using Edge.
Also, the user interface when using Safari on the iPhone 3G is vastly superior to anything else I've experienced on a cellphone, including a bunch of Opera-using ones. My last phone came with Opera and I really tried to like it but the UI made me want to smash my phone into little pieces....
/Mikael
While the first-gen iPhone may have been available in a handful of countries for a year it's not until now that it's readily available to a lot of people (there are lots of us who weren't too thrilled about having to jailbreak (and potentially brick) a non-3G phone).
/Mikael
So there isn't an SSH client then? Because as I mentioned in my post, I'm running the iPhone 3G and there is still no way to jailbreak the iPhone 3G...
Besides, an SSH client in the app store would be so much more convenient.
/Mikael
I too enjoy the simplicity of the app store and unless there is a very good reason to do so I will not jailbreak my iPhone 3G if/when it becomes possible.
The only thing that could really get me interested in jailbreaking my iPhone 3G right now would be if there was a way to jailbreak it and there was a free SSH client needed the phone to be jailbroken. But as there currently is no SSH client for the iPhone 3G at all then there is no point for me to care about jailbreaking.
I am hoping someone will release a free or cheap (and good) SSH client through the app store though.
/Mikael
Pretty much every Mac user I know has a large high-res monitor, but maybe that's because most mac users I know are techies or people who work with graphics.
/Mikael
The fullscreen thing is a different design philosophy, one that isn't based in a world where users are assumed to be so dumb that they're running their 256-bit quad-core 6GHz machine with a Geforce13900GTXS++ graphics card and a 42" LCD monitor in 800x600.
Basically, "maximize" is IMO a horrible legacy of the days when the average cheap-ass user had to run apps in full-screen mode to be able to be productive, these days there is no sane reason for just about any everyday app to run in fullscreen (why would you want Safari/Firefox or Mail.app running fullscreen on a 1920x1200 monitor?), and the few that have good reason to run in fullscreen generally have a "real" maximize button (like Maya).
It's simply the preferred default that apps don't just grab all available screen real estate.
/Mikael
Exactly and also, does the fact that my first thought was "Of course they have, it's not like they're gamers" mean I need to turn in my geek card?
/Mikael (goes back to trying to figure out how to make the iPhone not strip EXIF data when emailing photos)
The first three things I decided I wanted to find (and even purchase if there wasn't a free version available were:
Now, to my knowledge there is an ssh client available for first gen iPhones (jailbreaked) but despite this no one has bothered putting together a simple SSH client for the 3G iPhone?
/Mikael