I applied for roughly 30 jobs last year on Monster. About half of them I was qualified for, and the other half I wasn't quite qualified for but knew I could train myself in a very short time to do the job. I even took the time to write personalized cover letters for each company (not for all of them, but most) to show that I knew something about what their company does, how I can help them, etc.
It's become obvious to me that all that doesn't matter. I never got a job from Monster listings, after five months of job searching. Not even an e-mail response acknowledging my application. I think that their Monster listing generates thousands of e-mails per day in spam, so they probably throw them through some sort of program that picks 1 random message out of a 1000, and if it turns out to be a real application, it's probably someone unqualified. Or perhaps it's just an HR department's way to prove to a company that they are making an attempt to hire skilled people fairly ("look, we're on Monster. so don't accuse us of only hiring local people without skills").
I've also noticed that unless you have a lifetime of experience at one specific skill, you're not worth anything. It's funny, but I once saw a job listing that required *10* years of Java experience. But of course, I'm only an amateur programmer who has a clue, rather than a clueless professional programmer atrophied in a certain language.
Oh well, I like my current job, even it it's not techy. And I'm damn happy to have one at all.
This reminds me of when I went to see Dungeons & Dragons. About midway through the movie (maybe it was more towards the end), all of a sudden things flip around. Took me a couple of seconds to figure out what happened, but then I realized that the film was upside down and playing backwards! Oops, someone messed up on the splice.;) The characters were sitting upside-down on dragons that sucked in balls of flame, with people shouting "neaodfnorf... herodohorderf!".
It actually made the ticket worthwhile, since the movie (played correctly) sucked so bad.
What IS the .NET?
on
What is .NET?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the.NET is. You have to see it for yourself.
Soon, the government will have a record of all the books we've bought, and when the time comes, their firemen will come and torch our houses for owning them.
Okay, maybe that won't actually happen, but it does make one feel just a bit paranoid knowing that our choice of books might be monitored... perhaps that will disuade some from buying books. What do the book publishers have to say about this, which may reduce their sales?
Sierra games have done many things for me when I was a kid. First, they got me interested in computers. My father had a computer at home for work, and one day brought the Magic Cauldron Sierra game home, and my mom laughed as she moved a little walking guy around the screen, and I got into the fun. Then in one scene of the game where I was trapped in a cell, I looked at the wall and saw a crack that described a scene for King Quest I, and so my pattern of being addicted to Sierra games began (and moving on to learning to do other things on the computer, like write BASIC programs, then move on to C, etc.)...
Another thing Sierra games helped me with is learning to read and write. At the time, I was living overseas and going to a non-English school, and had to learn English at home. The command lines and dialog really helped me because it made reading really fun for me, and I became a pro at typing. Sure, the commands you type in Sierra games aren't exactly great in literary quality ("l room", "get thing", "give thing to guy"), but it didn't matter. I even wrote to Ken Williams (then-coowner/president of Sierra) telling him how I liked Sierra's games because they taught me how to read and type, and he wrote me back!
I miss those good old adventure games.
Oh, and take a look at Sarien... I always wanted to see a good, modern AGI interpreter that runs in our current OSes. I hope someone gets an SCI interpreter done that'll allow for good speed adjustment for games like Space Quest IV (which is a pain in the ass to play on a fast computer, even with MoSlo). Problem is, I think SCI is too complicated to reverse engineer. I'd like to see Sierra release the specifications and documentation for it, since it's hardly a money-maker anymore (it's an obsolete game development environment).
would you rather be shot by a dozen BB pellets or a single shotgun blast?
Since a shotgun (usually) fires out many small pellets (smaller pellets with larger gauge number), perhaps a modification to this analogy should go along the lines of: would you rather be shot at a distance by a.410 shotgun or a 50-caliber rifle?
I'd pick the shotgun, I'd just like to bring along a piece of plywood to take the sting out.;)
Re:Are their servers anyway.
on
AOL vs. Trillian
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· Score: 3, Insightful
AOL may have control over their server, but not over the connections. The Internet is based on open standards, with the intention that a protocol can be duplicated by anybody's client for platform/OS independence. If you can figure out a protocol, whether it's documented in RFC or closed, you can easily duplicate it, as long as it's unencrypted. This is generally a Good Thing(tm), but AOL wants control over its clients and connections, so to them it's a Bad Thing(tm). Either they need to utilize some form of authentication/encryption or just live with the fact that everybody's going to write their own clients.
After all these years of being "connected" to the Internet, it looks like they still don't "get it."
Not according to Microsoft (on their knowledgebase). This article states that Win2k needs ACPI to support OS hibernation, and that the BIOS has to support it. Although Microsoft has been known to contradict itself.
And simply having a WHQL-certified drivers doesn't necessarily mean it'll work. I had a Future Domain SCSI controller in my computer that loaded with the default Win2k WHQL driver, but I could never hibernate it. When I swapped it out with an Adaptec 2940UW, I was able to enable Hibernation in my Control Panel settings.
Have you been to a major city EVER? The American dream is to have a big car and drive fast, but it just doesn't scale. That lifestyle has to change. And yes, we do need to kid ourselves with 'space-age transportation pipe dreams', because the longer we wait the harder it will be to integrate those systems with our cities.
It's already too late for major cities for new types of mass transit, something that we should have thought about at least 50 years ago. But with the Big Three trying to keep Americans happy with the freedom of driving a car anywhere, including to major cities, we've been going down the wrong path for far too long and is mostly irreversible. It's hard enough to expand upon transportation systems already in place because of right-of-way acquisition costs.
The article mentioned that the footprint of the track would require very little right-of-way, but it all adds up when you want the track to be more than just a few hundred feet long, especially in major cities where land costs a pretty penny. Who's going to foot the bill? Are surrounding counties/cities (whose residents are contributing to the congestion of a major city) going to all pitch in? Will they all benefit from the system? (looking at the Bay Area BART system as a case study, this is doubtful, at least initially. It takes decades to make the system to work for everybody).
Now, I'm not trying to cut this idea down. In fact, I think it's a great idea, a simple and elegant solution. But it's going to go against a lot of obstacles in our current big cities. It'll be an overly expensive job for these areas. I can see it working in future metropolii and suburbs. The same forethought that went into inventing such a system needs to go into designing the infrastructure and building cities and facilities around it, rather than the other way around.
You wanna retrofit your car so it plays nicely with other retrofitted cars?
I'll need to make a correction to my choice of words here. I meant to say future new computer-operated cars. Obviously this would be nearly impossible to manage individually retrofitted cars (retrofit, in this case, was the wrong word). This kind of system will need a great deal of thought into it. Perhaps it can be phased in like carpool lanes first, and eventually major freeways, or parallel "tollways", would be completely converted to it. I would also assume that this would be a Federally-regulated system, like on certain sections of interstate freeways. I don't know anything about this research, so all this is just wild speculation, and of course everyone should take it with a gargantuan grain of salt.
I hate it here. As soon as I pass my Oracle certification tests, I'm out of here, and the federal government can kiss my fucking ass.
GOVERNMENT: Please send the coordinates, in NAD83/NAVD88 form, to your rear-end toxic output interface so that we may determine funding qualifications for this project. This will need to be reviewed for a possible 2008-2009 fiscal year deployment.
What American commuters/travellers need is a system that utilizes our current transportation infrastructure, but improves congestion, and allows us to drive wherever we want when we're off of a freeway.
I believe there is a significant amount of research going on in a retrofitting of regular automobiles, where a computer system can keep track of all freeway traffic, and manuever them in the most efficient way in order to not cause clogging on the roads, like anticipating traffic merging from onramps, preventing unnecessary weaving, adjusting for breakdowns or accidents (accidents should be significantly lessened by this system, though), etc.
On the heaviest travelled highways, I see all too often people doing dumb things just for their personal perception of getting home faster, like madly weaving in between lanes, or passing traffic in the auxiliary (onramp/offramp merging) lanes, or semi-trucks gaining a whole 1MPH by passing another truck. Things like these make an already-congested road worse. This is the best shorter-term solution. We ain't going to see very many alternatives in the next 10-20 years, believe me. Instead of kidding ourselves with environmentally-friendly space-age pipe dreams, we need a system that is more affordable and fits in with our lifestyle.
No single mode of transportation is advantageous in every area of the world.
I have a similar predicament. I live outside of the SF Bay Area, about 60 miles from work. There is a commuter train that stops in my town (a 5-minute drive from my apartment). When I moved here, I started riding the train, which took me to another town in which I could transfer by bus to BART (the rapid transit system that serves most of the Bay Area except San Jose). When all is said and done, it takes me 2.5 hours each way, and there are a lot of dependencies on my transfers. If I miss my commuter train back home, I have to wait 1.25 hours for the next one, which would make me very unhappy and I wouldn't get home until 7:30pm.
That's just too much wasted time with various possibilities of making my day not run smoothly. If I could just take the commuter train all the way to my work site, I'd be happy, I could just sleep the entire way. That's why I joined a vanpool. It cut an hour each way from my commute, I go pretty much directly from home to work, and I save money.
I will never ever regularly drive myself in my own car to work, though. I believe in mass/para transit systems, especially when there is more than one option... as long as they're kept clean too (some of those cars on BART are just nasty!).
Good luck on actually getting expired domain names, especially if they were registered through Network Solutions/VeriSign. In 2000, I waited for a domain name to expire, and then the record remained for months after the expiration. Network Solutions ultimately auctioned off their expired domain names, and the name I wanted popped up on a cybersquatter site for $5000.
I think Network Solutions is still doing this, because the name (even as a couple of different TLDs) has been expired since last year and is still unavailable to purchase. They're probably waiting on the market rebound and auction off their expired domain names again.
Let's just make sure that these things aren't vulnerable to one of those Outlook virii. I would appreciate not having my limbs twisted or ripped off while I'm inside one.;)
I know this is offtopic, but... I found this piece of information from the 3dfx (soon-to-be-deleted) Website:
Did you know NVIDIA GPUs are the graphics of choice for Half Life users? In a recent Valve Software survey, data captured from 35,488 Half Life user machines showed 67% of graphics were NVIDIA.
Your little body certainly does pull the entire mass of earth down onto it, just a little bit.
Right. Here's an example: Pluto's moon, Charon, is only slightly smaller than Pluto itself. Since Pluto's moon is quite big relative to Pluto, both objects "wobble" as they orbit the sun. Even Earth wobbles a little bit because of our moon, but not as much since our moon is significantly smaller than the earth. The Space Shuttle causes a microscopic wobble in the Earth that we can't measure.
The only thing keeping our moon from crashing into us, or Pluto and Charon from crashing into each other, is the orbital velocities. If you held Pluto and Charon at a standstill away from each other, they would both move towards each other and collide (with Charon accelerating towards Pluto slightly faster).
Every single particle in our universe has a gravitational force with respect to every other object in the universe... but small masses or great distances make them irrelevant.
A human standing on Earth will exert their weight on the Earth, and also feel the reaction of that weight on their feet. Therefore, the weight acts in both directions (remember Newton's equal and opposite reaction). A human in mid air will accelerate towards the Earth pretty fast, and the Earth's acceleration to the human is so minute (on the order of 10^(-22) m/s^2) that it can be ignored.
The weight in "W = m*g" in your case is a scalar because you chose to make the acceleration due to gravity, g, a scalar. If g were treated as a vector (g), W would also be a vector. Thus, W = m*g
The gravitation force isn't a bi-directional force per se, but it can still be broken down into x, y, and z components (and thus a vector) in order to simulate gravitational forces between multiple particles. All you have to do to find Fx, Fy, Fz (and make a new vector F to be = {Fx, Fy, Fz}) is to multiply your scalar F by a trigometric function, and now you can treat gravitational forces between particles as vectors, and can do stuff like summation of forces of multiple particles on a specific particle to find out where it'll be pulled.
You are in effect saying that gravitational forces are not vectors only because the equations you presented only yield scalar answers. You neglected to consider that these forces in fact behave as vectors when you have the interaction of multiple particles, or when one particle is moving with respect to the other. Your equation is a scalar only because the two particles are on the same axis, thus requiring no axis component breakdown into a vector (if that makes any sense).
Bollocks. If it's paid for with public money, the code needs to be public. If they want to keep their code proprietary, the researchers are free to seek private sources of funding.
I don't necessarily agree with this assertion, especially if you consider all tax-payer-funded products and services performed by the government, and not just from the coding perspective. Not all publically funded operations are made public, because there are various sensitivities involved, such as national security concerns, incomplete data that may be misinterpreted, or may be mixed with proprietary information.
These same concerns would apply to code, which should not necessarily be Open Sourced and made available to public scrutiny. However, I do believe that certain information should be publically available if they do not have any of these concerns, especially when the public is directly affected by it. Things like structures on public lands or roadways, systems that interface with citizens, etc. In these situations, it would behoove us to know how safe our health, identity, and assets are while in public places. Since the government guarantees us certain rights and protections while in their places, we sometimes would like to know how well it's doing that, as long as other sensitivities do not bar them from giving us that information.
Sometimes we don't need to know, and other times we do. Yeah, the government has to decide for us what information we need, and they may hold back in certain cases, but generally the "people" aren't well-equipped enough to make these kinds of decisions themselves (heck, we can't even directly vote for our own president, so why can't we expect other decisions to be made for us?). In a way, the government is already providing all the information it can on various department web pages.
It's a complex issue, nontheless, and would add even more beauracracy to our government. Do we need to Open Source public projects that bad?
I'm I the only one who finds the practice of releasing a "vanilla" DVD, then releasing a "extra groovy" DVD six months or a year later totally annoying?
Um, Tron was originally released on DVD in 1998. It was the very first DVD I bought when I got my Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM drive for my PC. Seeing that it's 2002 now, that's almost four years between DVD releases. And remember, back in 1998, almost all DVDs sucked as far as features, and most of us who were getting into DVDs that early were just appreciative that these movies were out on DVD.
I think the new DVD is warranted here. I own both copies now (I got my new Tron DVD today, a day before original release day, woohoo!).
But every version the.doc format changes, and everyone runs around trying to reverse engineer it YET AGAIN.
I can understand if you said this about the release of Word 97, but the truth is that since then the.doc format has had both forward and backward compatibility between Word 97, 2000, and XP. That's 4+ years of consistent compatibility, and pretty much every business is running one of those versions of Office now. The same is true for Excel and PowerPoint.
Any new formatting markups in a.doc file that prior versions of Word do not understand are simply ignored, just like new HTML markup in newer standards. What's the problem with this? For other office suites, developers can either: a) figure out how to interpret the new markup, or b) ignore it. The document will load up and look just fine either way. This is hardly reverse engineering.
Some script kiddie writes, you guessed it, a script to vote for Java. Unfortunately, our fallible friend forgot that counting on computers starts at 0, not 1, and accidentally sent all his votes to.NET.
In the mean time, since it is likely that none of you will live to see the next impact event, don't worry about it. When it happens, enjoy the event from your spectacular view from Heaven itself, if that's where you end up. On the other hand, if you're stoking the fires of Hell, you'll be too busy to worry about it.
And then those in the afterlife find out that the people in Hell are actually responsible for the asteroids. The Devil, a little bitter about his lot in life, decides to make his job a little more fun by playing some "games" on the rest of Creation. This includes lobbing large jagged objects at Earth. In the meantime, those in Heaven are busy pulling on ropes attached to Earth trying to pull it out of harm's way.
It should be no coincidence, then, that the majority of collisions of asteroids and comets with Earth occured before the dawn of Mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
It's become obvious to me that all that doesn't matter. I never got a job from Monster listings, after five months of job searching. Not even an e-mail response acknowledging my application. I think that their Monster listing generates thousands of e-mails per day in spam, so they probably throw them through some sort of program that picks 1 random message out of a 1000, and if it turns out to be a real application, it's probably someone unqualified. Or perhaps it's just an HR department's way to prove to a company that they are making an attempt to hire skilled people fairly ("look, we're on Monster. so don't accuse us of only hiring local people without skills").
I've also noticed that unless you have a lifetime of experience at one specific skill, you're not worth anything. It's funny, but I once saw a job listing that required *10* years of Java experience. But of course, I'm only an amateur programmer who has a clue, rather than a clueless professional programmer atrophied in a certain language.
Oh well, I like my current job, even it it's not techy. And I'm damn happy to have one at all.
It actually made the ticket worthwhile, since the movie (played correctly) sucked so bad.
Unfortunately, no one can be told what the .NET is. You have to see it for yourself.
Okay, maybe that won't actually happen, but it does make one feel just a bit paranoid knowing that our choice of books might be monitored... perhaps that will disuade some from buying books. What do the book publishers have to say about this, which may reduce their sales?
Another thing Sierra games helped me with is learning to read and write. At the time, I was living overseas and going to a non-English school, and had to learn English at home. The command lines and dialog really helped me because it made reading really fun for me, and I became a pro at typing. Sure, the commands you type in Sierra games aren't exactly great in literary quality ("l room", "get thing", "give thing to guy"), but it didn't matter. I even wrote to Ken Williams (then-coowner/president of Sierra) telling him how I liked Sierra's games because they taught me how to read and type, and he wrote me back!
I miss those good old adventure games.
Oh, and take a look at Sarien... I always wanted to see a good, modern AGI interpreter that runs in our current OSes. I hope someone gets an SCI interpreter done that'll allow for good speed adjustment for games like Space Quest IV (which is a pain in the ass to play on a fast computer, even with MoSlo). Problem is, I think SCI is too complicated to reverse engineer. I'd like to see Sierra release the specifications and documentation for it, since it's hardly a money-maker anymore (it's an obsolete game development environment).
I'd pick the shotgun, I'd just like to bring along a piece of plywood to take the sting out. ;)
After all these years of being "connected" to the Internet, it looks like they still don't "get it."
And simply having a WHQL-certified drivers doesn't necessarily mean it'll work. I had a Future Domain SCSI controller in my computer that loaded with the default Win2k WHQL driver, but I could never hibernate it. When I swapped it out with an Adaptec 2940UW, I was able to enable Hibernation in my Control Panel settings.
The article mentioned that the footprint of the track would require very little right-of-way, but it all adds up when you want the track to be more than just a few hundred feet long, especially in major cities where land costs a pretty penny. Who's going to foot the bill? Are surrounding counties/cities (whose residents are contributing to the congestion of a major city) going to all pitch in? Will they all benefit from the system? (looking at the Bay Area BART system as a case study, this is doubtful, at least initially. It takes decades to make the system to work for everybody).
Now, I'm not trying to cut this idea down. In fact, I think it's a great idea, a simple and elegant solution. But it's going to go against a lot of obstacles in our current big cities. It'll be an overly expensive job for these areas. I can see it working in future metropolii and suburbs. The same forethought that went into inventing such a system needs to go into designing the infrastructure and building cities and facilities around it, rather than the other way around.
I'll need to make a correction to my choice of words here. I meant to say future new computer-operated cars. Obviously this would be nearly impossible to manage individually retrofitted cars (retrofit, in this case, was the wrong word). This kind of system will need a great deal of thought into it. Perhaps it can be phased in like carpool lanes first, and eventually major freeways, or parallel "tollways", would be completely converted to it. I would also assume that this would be a Federally-regulated system, like on certain sections of interstate freeways. I don't know anything about this research, so all this is just wild speculation, and of course everyone should take it with a gargantuan grain of salt.I believe there is a significant amount of research going on in a retrofitting of regular automobiles, where a computer system can keep track of all freeway traffic, and manuever them in the most efficient way in order to not cause clogging on the roads, like anticipating traffic merging from onramps, preventing unnecessary weaving, adjusting for breakdowns or accidents (accidents should be significantly lessened by this system, though), etc.
On the heaviest travelled highways, I see all too often people doing dumb things just for their personal perception of getting home faster, like madly weaving in between lanes, or passing traffic in the auxiliary (onramp/offramp merging) lanes, or semi-trucks gaining a whole 1MPH by passing another truck. Things like these make an already-congested road worse. This is the best shorter-term solution. We ain't going to see very many alternatives in the next 10-20 years, believe me. Instead of kidding ourselves with environmentally-friendly space-age pipe dreams, we need a system that is more affordable and fits in with our lifestyle.
No single mode of transportation is advantageous in every area of the world.
That's just too much wasted time with various possibilities of making my day not run smoothly. If I could just take the commuter train all the way to my work site, I'd be happy, I could just sleep the entire way. That's why I joined a vanpool. It cut an hour each way from my commute, I go pretty much directly from home to work, and I save money.
I will never ever regularly drive myself in my own car to work, though. I believe in mass/para transit systems, especially when there is more than one option... as long as they're kept clean too (some of those cars on BART are just nasty!).
I think Network Solutions is still doing this, because the name (even as a couple of different TLDs) has been expired since last year and is still unavailable to purchase. They're probably waiting on the market rebound and auction off their expired domain names again.
Hmph.
Uuuuuuuuuuunnnnggghhhh!!!!
Let's just make sure that these things aren't vulnerable to one of those Outlook virii. I would appreciate not having my limbs twisted or ripped off while I'm inside one. ;)
That leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside.
The only thing keeping our moon from crashing into us, or Pluto and Charon from crashing into each other, is the orbital velocities. If you held Pluto and Charon at a standstill away from each other, they would both move towards each other and collide (with Charon accelerating towards Pluto slightly faster).
Every single particle in our universe has a gravitational force with respect to every other object in the universe... but small masses or great distances make them irrelevant.
A human standing on Earth will exert their weight on the Earth, and also feel the reaction of that weight on their feet. Therefore, the weight acts in both directions (remember Newton's equal and opposite reaction). A human in mid air will accelerate towards the Earth pretty fast, and the Earth's acceleration to the human is so minute (on the order of 10^(-22) m/s^2) that it can be ignored.
The gravitation force isn't a bi-directional force per se, but it can still be broken down into x, y, and z components (and thus a vector) in order to simulate gravitational forces between multiple particles. All you have to do to find Fx, Fy, Fz (and make a new vector F to be = {Fx, Fy, Fz}) is to multiply your scalar F by a trigometric function, and now you can treat gravitational forces between particles as vectors, and can do stuff like summation of forces of multiple particles on a specific particle to find out where it'll be pulled.
You are in effect saying that gravitational forces are not vectors only because the equations you presented only yield scalar answers. You neglected to consider that these forces in fact behave as vectors when you have the interaction of multiple particles, or when one particle is moving with respect to the other. Your equation is a scalar only because the two particles are on the same axis, thus requiring no axis component breakdown into a vector (if that makes any sense).
These same concerns would apply to code, which should not necessarily be Open Sourced and made available to public scrutiny. However, I do believe that certain information should be publically available if they do not have any of these concerns, especially when the public is directly affected by it. Things like structures on public lands or roadways, systems that interface with citizens, etc. In these situations, it would behoove us to know how safe our health, identity, and assets are while in public places. Since the government guarantees us certain rights and protections while in their places, we sometimes would like to know how well it's doing that, as long as other sensitivities do not bar them from giving us that information.
Sometimes we don't need to know, and other times we do. Yeah, the government has to decide for us what information we need, and they may hold back in certain cases, but generally the "people" aren't well-equipped enough to make these kinds of decisions themselves (heck, we can't even directly vote for our own president, so why can't we expect other decisions to be made for us?). In a way, the government is already providing all the information it can on various department web pages.
It's a complex issue, nontheless, and would add even more beauracracy to our government. Do we need to Open Source public projects that bad?
I think the new DVD is warranted here. I own both copies now (I got my new Tron DVD today, a day before original release day, woohoo!).
Any new formatting markups in a .doc file that prior versions of Word do not understand are simply ignored, just like new HTML markup in newer standards. What's the problem with this? For other office suites, developers can either: a) figure out how to interpret the new markup, or b) ignore it. The document will load up and look just fine either way. This is hardly reverse engineering.
Some script kiddie writes, you guessed it, a script to vote for Java. Unfortunately, our fallible friend forgot that counting on computers starts at 0, not 1, and accidentally sent all his votes to .NET.
It should be no coincidence, then, that the majority of collisions of asteroids and comets with Earth occured before the dawn of Mankind.
Chew on that. :P