You're right. Character does matter. Lets look a little more closely at that
paragon of morality and truthfullness, George W. Bush.
He claims that "special interests" are outspending him, when he's broken pretty
much every record there is for both fund raising and campaign spending.
He claims that his immediate tax break of $1.6 trillion is a quarter of the
projected surplus of $4.6 trillion. No wonder this guy accuses others of fuzzy
math, he's not capable of dividing by single digit numbers.
He's perfectly willing to sentence people to federal prisons their first drug
conviction, but conspicuously refuses to answer questions about his own "youthful
indiscretions" with cocaine.
Texas has had three times
as many executions this year as any state, including that of Gary Graham, who
was executed on the basis of a single eyewitness, despite the fact that there were
other witnesses who claimed he wasn't the same guy they saw. Is this what you mean
by character? Killing people out of hand before they've been given due legal
process? In most states this would be called accessory to murder.
Note that this isn't about the death penalty itself, it's about Bush's approach to
it. Taking a human life is the most terrible of responsibilities for any leader.
It's a penalty only to be applied in the most extreme cases, and only when you're
certain of the facts. Yet Bush applies it liberally, gleefully, and without the
slightest awareness of the responsibility he holds. If he takes a "what, me worry?"
attitude toward the actual killing of American citizens, what makes you think he's
going to take any of his other civil responsibilities seriously?
If Texas was its own country, it would have the highest percentage of its own
citizens incarcerated of any country in the world. More than China. More than
Iraq. More than Afghanistan. Do you want American society as a whole to be rebuilt
along the same lines?
Texas has "voluntary" environmental laws, which rapidly earned it the label of
the most polluted state in the union.
I'm always flabbergasted at people who argue for the rights of CEO's to poison them.
Do you own a factory? Are you getting a big tax break on that oil well you just
inherited? If the answer is no, then why in the hell do you think you'll be better
off breathing poisoned air, drinking poisoned water, and eating food grown from
poisoned soil? Do you want the rest of the USA to be as polluted as Texas?
Texas is consistently rated 49th or 50th when it comes to health care. The idea
that George W. will give you better health care than Al Gore is perhaps the dumbest
idea I've seen in this thread.
86.1% of Americans had health care coverage in 1999. Meanwhile, 75.9% of Texans
did. Don't trust me, look it up
yourself.
There's a host of minor lies that more than equal Gore's stretchers. Like the
idea that he supported the hate crimes law in Texas, when he actually let it die
without lifting a finger to help it. A similar thing occurred to the instant
background check for gun purchases which he claimed to support. He also said he believed in "equal rights for gays, but not special rights". Meanwhile, he opposed the addition of gays to hate crime statues in 1999.
He claimed that the infamous "rats" ad was an honest mistake on the part of the ad's creators. Anyone that's done any work with animation knows what a tedious, pixel-by-pixel, frame-by-frame process it can be. The idea that a frame with the large word "rats" stretching across it could just somehow slip in to the final product without anyone noticing is perhaps the most ridiculous lie I've heard in this campaign. And Bush knows this, he's a veteran of the process of crafting political ads.
In additon to being a lie, this incident gave a good indication of the kind of people Bush surrounds himself with -- sophmoric buffoons. Everybody knows subliminal ads don't work, at least not for something as abstract as a political campaign. But they did it anyway, just to be cute. It doesn't give me much confidence when it comes to Bush's selection of a cabinet -- and remember, that cabinet will be doing all the work, since Bush's philosophy is that a leader doesn't have to actually know anything. Similarly, his close affiliation with Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, and the like simply terrifies me, particularly when it comes to the influence they'll wield on supreme court appointments, which could have ruinous effects for the next thirty years.
Bush has said dozens of times that he won't stoop to personal attacks, but his reponse to Gore's facts and figures is always the same. "The man's a liar! He has no credibility!". He has to resort to this types of attacks because that's all he has. He sure as hell can't dispute Gore's numbers -- or at least he hasn't so far.
So in short, Gore has told some lies about minor details of his anecdotes, while Bush has told lies about the sum and substance of his policies. Since you have the simplistic and childish viewpoint that you'll never vote for a politician that lies, I guess that means you can't vote for either. And you can't vote for Nader, either, since he's constantly telling the single biggest lie of all of this campaign -- that there's no difference between Bush and Gore.
Everything you said is true. I just wanted to add that another reason a manager of techies should have some technical sophistication is because otherwise the employees will be bullshitting the manager continuously.
Sure, your argument would have some merit if taxes were sufficiently high that corporations were making zero profit. THEN you'd see the price increase. Do you think that's the reality? Do you think Microsoft, AT&T, Coca-Cola etc. won't see any profits if we eliminate tax loopholes? Do you think they aren't charging the maximum they can get away with now?
This guy is right about real wages in the two countries. The only way I'd return to Canada is if someone dragged me kicking and screaming across the border.
Amazing how in any thread, on any topic, you can find lots of ignorant Canadians saying "come here, Canada is the best in the world at {fill-in-the-blank}". The less time they've spent in other countries, the surer they are of their opinions.
That's a pretty mushy post. First you object to my language. I guess you've never met a shithead before. Must be pleasant to live in a bubble.
Second, you post some obvious platitudes about hiring the right people in the first place while totally ignoring the reality that this doesn't always happen. Some people are good at hiding their incompetence during interviews, some interviewers are incompentent themselves, sometimes people lose interest in jobs and just stop caring.
One of the prime functions of any good manager is to identify these people and get rid of them. It's not about "me over you", it's about ensuring that the hard work of all your other employees isn't derailed by a small number of assholes.
Yes, as a general rule, you try to get people back on track before you fire them. I would think that would be obvious. But equally obvious is that there's such a thing as unforgivable offences. This was one. The "Netscape engineers are weenies" back door was another one.
I can't imagine sitting down with a program manager and saying "Now John, in the future, you really shouldn't cause our software to spam the internet with fradulent endorsements". Because when a person makes a decision that stupid, sleazy, and utterly contrary to the interests of their company they've shown sufficiently bad judgement to demonstrate that they're not going to help the company any by staying. Indeed, they're probably going to fuck up something else in the future. Get rid of them, and promote someone who deserves it. Your company will be stronger, and your employees will thank you for no longer having to cover for the idiot in their midst.
Maybe you should go see The Empire Strikes Back again and rethink your post.
I could sit and watch that again and enjoy it, even though I'm now old enough to have children of my own. Yes, it's space opera, which makes it somewhat juvenile in a way, but it was much darker and more adult in the treatment of its themes.
Consider the ending: how many kiddie movies have you seen that end with a lead character frozen in metal, with an agonized look on his face, and shipped off as a trophy to a slave lord?
Compare that to episode one, which was about as engaging and realistic as a Teletubbies video.
There's a big difference between making a movie that is entertaining to children and making a movie that actively insults their intelligence. The first two Star Wars were examples of the former, while the last two were examples of the latter.
It's not a "poor excuse", it's what happened. Do you think Bill Gates personally ordered this fiasco to happen?
Unless you're some mind-controlling supermutant a la "The Mule" from the Foundation books, you can not take personal responsibility for the actions of 30,000 people under you. What you can do is eliminate the shitheads to make sure it doesn't happen again.
MSN's responsibility is to find the people that did put this plan into motion and give them the boot. They should also apologize to their users. Trying to pin the fault for this on Bill Gates directly is just another example of ridiculous Slashdot hyperbole. Amazing how this crap always gets moderated up.
I take it you've never tried to help someone immigrate to Canada.
Nothing relating to the Canadian government is ever easy. It's faster, cheaper, and easier to immigrate to the USA. I married an American citizen and I couldn't believe how much easier it was for me to get a green card here than it was for her to get landed immigrant status in Canada.
Now we'll see how many remarks this provokes from the usual gang of outraged and ignorant Canadian xenophobes who are convinced that no country could ever do anything better than Canada, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I had the same problems with credit when I first moved here. Having no credit record is worse than having a bad one in many cases. Nobody gave a damn about my wage here, I couldn't get credit to buy even the smallest thing.
You should find a good credit union. Get one that focuses on high tech workers if you can, since they'll be a lot more familar with your situation and will have more confidence in you since they know the current job market.
I joined one called "First Tech" and it solved all of my credit problems. They'll extend credit to you immediately if you have a good job, and all financial transactions I've done through them have been pretty painless, especially compared to the Canadian banks I've been used to dealing with.
Once one major financial institution "recognizes" you, the rest will soon follow. Now I get "pre-approved" credit card offers in the mail damn near every day.
P.S. Don't let the other assholes in this thread get you down. It's pretty clear to me why they can't get a job, and it has nothing to do with you or I.
I'm in my 30's and I've never seen "age discrimination" at any place I've worked.
There's a lot of useless old fucks that think they should get a fat paycheck just for showing up every week, even though they haven't learned anything new in five years. There's also gray-haired types that have kept their skills current and are in high demand everywhere they go. If you're not spending at least an hour a day keeping up with new technology, you WILL find yourself obsolete and unemployed one day, sooner than you think, and it will be no one's fault but your own.
I think your "age discrimination", Mr. Coward, is just the baby boomer's natural tendency to point a finger and whine loudly whenever they don't get everything they want. It must be discrimination, since it certainly couldn't be your own fault, could it?
No, he's completely right. The original drug laws passed in the USA were racist. It's hardly a canard.
Opium laws were originally directed at Chinese labourers. They prohibited smoking opium, which the Chinese preferred, but left perfectly legal the various opium potions and concoctions that white people enjoyed. It's similar to the situation with crack and cocaine now.
Marijuana laws were directed at Mexican immigrants and, later, black musicians. The spanish word "marijuana" became widespread then through the fearmongering of the antidrug politicians of the day. Many legislators didn't even know that the demon-weed marijuana smoked by those damn wetbacks was the same useful hemp plant grown by Americans for centuries.
Look up the facts, they're freely available from any search prompt. You can start with this chapter of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, by the late Peter McWilliams. He recently died because a federal court prohibited him from using medical marijuana, but that's a story for another day.
Heinlein is, unfortunately, one of the more unappreciated SF writers.
Excuse me? Unappreciated? The man that is regularly cited as the grandmaster of science fiction? The man that is always included in the "big three" along with Clarke and Asimov?
Now, if you said "Heinlein is, unfortunately, the most overrated sci-fi writer of all time", I'd agree with you without reservation. Though I'm sure there's lots of high school kids that find his ideas insightful.
I'm unfamiliar with AirTouch so I can't comment on it's suckiness, but it's hard to imagine anything sucking more than BellAtlantic.
I suspect you've never had an account with US West.
I live in Bellevue, Washington, about three minutes from Microsoft's main campus, and I can't get DSL. I've had broadband since 1996 and now I'm booted back to 56K dialup. Oh, the shame.
When my lease runs out and I go house-hunting again, at each place the first question I'm going to ask will be "Is this house serviced by US West?". If the answer is yes, I'm history, regardless of what a good deal it is.
Things might improve now that they've been bought by Qwest but I'll believe it when I see it.
As for higher availability of DSL lines, do you have hard numbers to back up that allegation?
I don't have any hard numbers either, but my experiences tend to support the first poster's statement.
I lived in Ottawa, Canada in 1996 and both cable modems and ADSL were freely available. It wasn't like the American system where you pay for the capacity of the line, either. If you subscribed to ADSL you got a 2.2M line for about $70 Can a month (about $45 US a month).
I had a friend who had a cable modem in Hamilton, Ontario in 1994. It was part of a test market, though.
So on the whole I think the Canadians were a little faster in rolling out broadband than the Americans.
Let me pass on some things I've learned as a contractor.
The person who described recruiters as "buzzword parsers" is correct. You really should list every skill you've used for each job you've done.
Most initial screeners aren't very technical themselves so all they're doing is looking for certain words to appear on the resume. Don't make shit up, but don't hesitate to list a skill even if your knowledge in it isn't that impressive. Most programmers underestimate the number of skills/software they know.
Make a summary of your major skills, listed by years of experience, and put it at the top of your resume. Again, it's a matter of making the recruiter's job easier. If you're doing his work for him, you're much more likely to be recommended for positions. Silly, yes, but it's the way it works.
You will get asked "brain teaser" style programming questions. Strangely enough, the less money you ask for, the more likely you are to get a technical grilling.
If you can't immediately code through the problem given, there's two other things you can do that will greatly impress the interviewer.
The first is to demonstrate that you do indeed understand the complexity of the problem. Think aloud, showing that you see the roadblocks in front of you, even if you don't see exactly how to get around them. That's good enough in most circumstances. They just want to know that you know how to attack a problem.
The second thing you should do, when you're truely stumped, is simply say "I don't know." Don't gild yourself, don't make up excuses, don't show off...just say "I don't know how to do this." You'll be suprised at how much this can impress an interviewer.
Absolutely the worst thing you can do is stand in front of the whiteboard like an idiot, humming and hawing and trying to bullshit your way around a problem. This just wastes the interviewer's time which will almost always result you in not getting the job. Better to just admit immediately that you don't know how to do something.
The interviewer's next question will probably be "well, what would you do next?" What he wants to hear is that you know of several resources for the language in question so you can look up the right answer. What he doesn't want to hear is "Well, I guess I'd go ask you how to do it."
Ask for more money!
There is a huge demand for good programmers right now and obscene amounts of money floating around. Take advantage of it while it lasts.
The strangest thing about increasing your salary demands is that it makes it much easier to get a job. If you ask for $30 K, you're going to get grilled at the interview and you'll be suspicious to the interviewer, who is problably thinking, "If this guy is asking for 30K in this market, he must be useless". Ask for $80 K, and your technical skills will be more or less assumed and the interviewer will become more like a salesman, trying to convince you of the merits of working for his company. I know this sounds like total horseshit but I've experienced it personally.
Obviously you won't get away with this unless you really do know your shit. It's been my experience, though, that many hackers seriously underestimate their own market value. If you're the type of person that is compelled to learn new tech for its own sake, then the odds are you've learned far more than the guy that just got his CS degree because someone told him he could make a lot of money as a programmer. Don't sell yourself short.
The read brilliance of it, in my opinion, was that when you clicked the X in the corner to cloase it, it would just minimize. When I first saw that last september... I was extatic.
Uggh, that was something I really hated about the UI. The exit icon should always exit a program. It's too fundamental an aspect of the Windows UI to mess around with.
A better way to do it would be like mIRC's interface, where you can set the minimize button to minimize to the tray. That way you can "hide" the program but still get a true exit when you want it.
Re:Full-time Microsoft employees have blue badges.
on
The Myth Of The Borg
·
· Score: 2
I've worked two contracts for Microsoft. I just started the second a couple of weeks ago. Let me dispel some misinformation in this thread.
Yes, there are two types of cardkeys at Microsoft -- blue and orange (I've never heard them called yellow).
Contractors have orange cards. They give you 24/7 access to the building you work in, and access to other MS buildings during business hours. The lone exception to this is the Microsoft press building, curiously enough.
It's not at all like the previous poster said, that "yellow" badges only let you in "a few buildings during business hours".
I don't know if there are access restrictions on blue badges as I've never had one.
I've certainly never had reason to complain about the access given by an orange card since I've never had any reason to be in a building where I don't work after hours.
Several months ago relations between contractors and MS employees were getting pretty rough. This was mainly because of a lawsuit which determined that long-time contractors (permatemps) were entitled to some form of recompense due to never being given the stock options that MS employees had.
This really pissed off a lot of MS employees, who felt with some justification that they had sacrificed a large amount of their life to get those stock options. Remember, contractors are often more highly paid than MS employees, who count on the stock options for a big payoff when they're vested.
Several bullshit manoevres went down which seemed to stem from this resentment. For example, in my department all the contractors were yanked from their offices and placed in "bays", which are basically hallways crammed full of desks. There were seven of us stuffed into the bay where I worked.
I don't think crap like this came from "on high", it was just pissed off middle managers.
The executive reaction to this lawsuit seemed to be to try to eliminate the "permatemp" class of worker. But since MS relies on these people, they couldn't get rid of them, so for the most part they offered them full time jobs.
This was a pretty happy outcome, all in all. I looked up a lot of the contractors I worked with during my last contract there, which was only about 5 months ago, and everyone had blue badges now. They seemed quite happy with the way things worked out, and obviously, it totally eliminated the employee/contractor friction.
I'm still a contractor, and likely to remain one. So far, I haven't seen an ounce of disdain from any of the people I work with. I'm treated like a full time employee now. I've got my own office.
So to summarize, the conflict between employees and contractors at MS was once a very real thing, though it was nowhere near the levels you'd expect from reading Slashdot. But it's pretty much a thing of the past now, at least in the departments of MS that I've had contact with.
I think Netscape has been way behind ever since IE 3.0 came out. Netscape has been holding back the development of the internet for years. It's about time the standards bodies blasted them. Now if only the "true believers" would wake up and sniff reality.
Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.
I really like that phrase, "Lobotomized for Netscape". I think I'll make a graphic for that, like those "optimized for..." graphics that were in vogue a few years ago, and start putting it on all pages I have to "modify" for Netscape.
Then feel free to take care of this in the constitutionally mandated way: Have your congressman or senators propose an amendment to repeal the 2nd Amendment. Plenty of people probably agree with you, and you only have to convince most of the state legislatures. It could happen...and while I wouldn't support the substance, I would accept that you're trying to improve the country in a way that supports the basic precepts upon which it was founded....instead of requesting that it be ignored because it doesn't matter anymore.
I agree with you entirely on this point. I think both sides on this issue should have the balls to propose a rewrite of this amendment. If gun ownership should be a universal individual right, let it be written as such. If guns are to banned, or severely curtailed, let the gun grabbers do it with a constitutional amendment.
Or I guess we could all argue about the meaning of that one horribly written sentence for another 200 years.
I've seen several reviews where people were pissed off about the director "adding" the holocaust connection. I haven't read the X-Men in about 10 years, so I don't know if that part of Magneto's past has been played down, but it used to be a major part of his character before that.
I even remember an issue I had that's at least 20 years old where it's revealed that Magneto's powers didn't manifest until shortly after the war. The first thing he did is sign on with the Israeli government as a nazi hunter. As you can imagine, when he found Nazis, he didn't turn them over for trial, either.
And where does Katz get the idea that we're supposed to "hate" Magneto? Xavier "hated" him so much that he entrusted his youngest students, the New Mutants, to Magneto's care at one point. Magneto's ambiguity was always one of the strongest points of the comic. A reader can't help but respect the man even if he disagrees with his methods. And is Magneto really that paranoid? It could be argued that Xavier is the one that is the dreamer, out of touch with reality -- but it is a beautiful dream.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. Character does matter. Lets look a little more closely at that paragon of morality and truthfullness, George W. Bush.
Note that this isn't about the death penalty itself, it's about Bush's approach to it. Taking a human life is the most terrible of responsibilities for any leader. It's a penalty only to be applied in the most extreme cases, and only when you're certain of the facts. Yet Bush applies it liberally, gleefully, and without the slightest awareness of the responsibility he holds. If he takes a "what, me worry?" attitude toward the actual killing of American citizens, what makes you think he's going to take any of his other civil responsibilities seriously?
I'm always flabbergasted at people who argue for the rights of CEO's to poison them. Do you own a factory? Are you getting a big tax break on that oil well you just inherited? If the answer is no, then why in the hell do you think you'll be better off breathing poisoned air, drinking poisoned water, and eating food grown from poisoned soil? Do you want the rest of the USA to be as polluted as Texas?
86.1% of Americans had health care coverage in 1999. Meanwhile, 75.9% of Texans did. Don't trust me, look it up yourself.
In additon to being a lie, this incident gave a good indication of the kind of people Bush surrounds himself with -- sophmoric buffoons. Everybody knows subliminal ads don't work, at least not for something as abstract as a political campaign. But they did it anyway, just to be cute. It doesn't give me much confidence when it comes to Bush's selection of a cabinet -- and remember, that cabinet will be doing all the work, since Bush's philosophy is that a leader doesn't have to actually know anything. Similarly, his close affiliation with Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, and the like simply terrifies me, particularly when it comes to the influence they'll wield on supreme court appointments, which could have ruinous effects for the next thirty years.
So in short, Gore has told some lies about minor details of his anecdotes, while Bush has told lies about the sum and substance of his policies. Since you have the simplistic and childish viewpoint that you'll never vote for a politician that lies, I guess that means you can't vote for either. And you can't vote for Nader, either, since he's constantly telling the single biggest lie of all of this campaign -- that there's no difference between Bush and Gore.
I guess you'll have to stay home on Election day.
Everything you said is true. I just wanted to add that another reason a manager of techies should have some technical sophistication is because otherwise the employees will be bullshitting the manager continuously.
Sure, your argument would have some merit if taxes were sufficiently high that corporations were making zero profit. THEN you'd see the price increase. Do you think that's the reality? Do you think Microsoft, AT&T, Coca-Cola etc. won't see any profits if we eliminate tax loopholes? Do you think they aren't charging the maximum they can get away with now?
This guy is right about real wages in the two countries. The only way I'd return to Canada is if someone dragged me kicking and screaming across the border.
Amazing how in any thread, on any topic, you can find lots of ignorant Canadians saying "come here, Canada is the best in the world at {fill-in-the-blank}". The less time they've spent in other countries, the surer they are of their opinions.
Which is why George W. stresses his "ability to lead" in every speech he makes.
You've got that right.
That's a pretty mushy post. First you object to my language. I guess you've never met a shithead before. Must be pleasant to live in a bubble.
Second, you post some obvious platitudes about hiring the right people in the first place while totally ignoring the reality that this doesn't always happen. Some people are good at hiding their incompetence during interviews, some interviewers are incompentent themselves, sometimes people lose interest in jobs and just stop caring.
One of the prime functions of any good manager is to identify these people and get rid of them. It's not about "me over you", it's about ensuring that the hard work of all your other employees isn't derailed by a small number of assholes.
Yes, as a general rule, you try to get people back on track before you fire them. I would think that would be obvious. But equally obvious is that there's such a thing as unforgivable offences. This was one. The "Netscape engineers are weenies" back door was another one.
I can't imagine sitting down with a program manager and saying "Now John, in the future, you really shouldn't cause our software to spam the internet with fradulent endorsements". Because when a person makes a decision that stupid, sleazy, and utterly contrary to the interests of their company they've shown sufficiently bad judgement to demonstrate that they're not going to help the company any by staying. Indeed, they're probably going to fuck up something else in the future. Get rid of them, and promote someone who deserves it. Your company will be stronger, and your employees will thank you for no longer having to cover for the idiot in their midst.
Maybe you should go see The Empire Strikes Back again and rethink your post.
I could sit and watch that again and enjoy it, even though I'm now old enough to have children of my own. Yes, it's space opera, which makes it somewhat juvenile in a way, but it was much darker and more adult in the treatment of its themes.
Consider the ending: how many kiddie movies have you seen that end with a lead character frozen in metal, with an agonized look on his face, and shipped off as a trophy to a slave lord?
Compare that to episode one, which was about as engaging and realistic as a Teletubbies video.
There's a big difference between making a movie that is entertaining to children and making a movie that actively insults their intelligence. The first two Star Wars were examples of the former, while the last two were examples of the latter.
It's not a "poor excuse", it's what happened. Do you think Bill Gates personally ordered this fiasco to happen?
Unless you're some mind-controlling supermutant a la "The Mule" from the Foundation books, you can not take personal responsibility for the actions of 30,000 people under you. What you can do is eliminate the shitheads to make sure it doesn't happen again.
MSN's responsibility is to find the people that did put this plan into motion and give them the boot. They should also apologize to their users. Trying to pin the fault for this on Bill Gates directly is just another example of ridiculous Slashdot hyperbole. Amazing how this crap always gets moderated up.
I take it you've never tried to help someone immigrate to Canada.
Nothing relating to the Canadian government is ever easy. It's faster, cheaper, and easier to immigrate to the USA. I married an American citizen and I couldn't believe how much easier it was for me to get a green card here than it was for her to get landed immigrant status in Canada.
Now we'll see how many remarks this provokes from the usual gang of outraged and ignorant Canadian xenophobes who are convinced that no country could ever do anything better than Canada, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
I had the same problems with credit when I first moved here. Having no credit record is worse than having a bad one in many cases. Nobody gave a damn about my wage here, I couldn't get credit to buy even the smallest thing.
You should find a good credit union. Get one that focuses on high tech workers if you can, since they'll be a lot more familar with your situation and will have more confidence in you since they know the current job market.
I joined one called "First Tech" and it solved all of my credit problems. They'll extend credit to you immediately if you have a good job, and all financial transactions I've done through them have been pretty painless, especially compared to the Canadian banks I've been used to dealing with.
Once one major financial institution "recognizes" you, the rest will soon follow. Now I get "pre-approved" credit card offers in the mail damn near every day.
P.S. Don't let the other assholes in this thread get you down. It's pretty clear to me why they can't get a job, and it has nothing to do with you or I.
I'm in my 30's and I've never seen "age discrimination" at any place I've worked.
There's a lot of useless old fucks that think they should get a fat paycheck just for showing up every week, even though they haven't learned anything new in five years. There's also gray-haired types that have kept their skills current and are in high demand everywhere they go. If you're not spending at least an hour a day keeping up with new technology, you WILL find yourself obsolete and unemployed one day, sooner than you think, and it will be no one's fault but your own.
I think your "age discrimination", Mr. Coward, is just the baby boomer's natural tendency to point a finger and whine loudly whenever they don't get everything they want. It must be discrimination, since it certainly couldn't be your own fault, could it?
No, he's completely right. The original drug laws passed in the USA were racist. It's hardly a canard.
Opium laws were originally directed at Chinese labourers. They prohibited smoking opium, which the Chinese preferred, but left perfectly legal the various opium potions and concoctions that white people enjoyed. It's similar to the situation with crack and cocaine now.
Marijuana laws were directed at Mexican immigrants and, later, black musicians. The spanish word "marijuana" became widespread then through the fearmongering of the antidrug politicians of the day. Many legislators didn't even know that the demon-weed marijuana smoked by those damn wetbacks was the same useful hemp plant grown by Americans for centuries.
Look up the facts, they're freely available from any search prompt. You can start with this chapter of Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do, by the late Peter McWilliams. He recently died because a federal court prohibited him from using medical marijuana, but that's a story for another day.
RAID isn't a source control product, it's a bug tracking system.
They use Source Depot.
Heinlein is, unfortunately, one of the more unappreciated SF writers.
Excuse me? Unappreciated? The man that is regularly cited as the grandmaster of science fiction? The man that is always included in the "big three" along with Clarke and Asimov?
Now, if you said "Heinlein is, unfortunately, the most overrated sci-fi writer of all time", I'd agree with you without reservation. Though I'm sure there's lots of high school kids that find his ideas insightful.
I suspect you've never had an account with US West.
I live in Bellevue, Washington, about three minutes from Microsoft's main campus, and I can't get DSL. I've had broadband since 1996 and now I'm booted back to 56K dialup. Oh, the shame.
When my lease runs out and I go house-hunting again, at each place the first question I'm going to ask will be "Is this house serviced by US West?". If the answer is yes, I'm history, regardless of what a good deal it is.
Things might improve now that they've been bought by Qwest but I'll believe it when I see it.
As for higher availability of DSL lines, do you have hard numbers to back up that allegation?
I don't have any hard numbers either, but my experiences tend to support the first poster's statement.
I lived in Ottawa, Canada in 1996 and both cable modems and ADSL were freely available. It wasn't like the American system where you pay for the capacity of the line, either. If you subscribed to ADSL you got a 2.2M line for about $70 Can a month (about $45 US a month).
I had a friend who had a cable modem in Hamilton, Ontario in 1994. It was part of a test market, though.
So on the whole I think the Canadians were a little faster in rolling out broadband than the Americans.
Let me pass on some things I've learned as a contractor.
Most initial screeners aren't very technical themselves so all they're doing is looking for certain words to appear on the resume. Don't make shit up, but don't hesitate to list a skill even if your knowledge in it isn't that impressive. Most programmers underestimate the number of skills/software they know.
If you can't immediately code through the problem given, there's two other things you can do that will greatly impress the interviewer.
The first is to demonstrate that you do indeed understand the complexity of the problem. Think aloud, showing that you see the roadblocks in front of you, even if you don't see exactly how to get around them. That's good enough in most circumstances. They just want to know that you know how to attack a problem.
The second thing you should do, when you're truely stumped, is simply say "I don't know." Don't gild yourself, don't make up excuses, don't show off...just say "I don't know how to do this." You'll be suprised at how much this can impress an interviewer.
Absolutely the worst thing you can do is stand in front of the whiteboard like an idiot, humming and hawing and trying to bullshit your way around a problem. This just wastes the interviewer's time which will almost always result you in not getting the job. Better to just admit immediately that you don't know how to do something.
The interviewer's next question will probably be "well, what would you do next?" What he wants to hear is that you know of several resources for the language in question so you can look up the right answer. What he doesn't want to hear is "Well, I guess I'd go ask you how to do it."
There is a huge demand for good programmers right now and obscene amounts of money floating around. Take advantage of it while it lasts.
The strangest thing about increasing your salary demands is that it makes it much easier to get a job. If you ask for $30 K, you're going to get grilled at the interview and you'll be suspicious to the interviewer, who is problably thinking, "If this guy is asking for 30K in this market, he must be useless". Ask for $80 K, and your technical skills will be more or less assumed and the interviewer will become more like a salesman, trying to convince you of the merits of working for his company. I know this sounds like total horseshit but I've experienced it personally.
Obviously you won't get away with this unless you really do know your shit. It's been my experience, though, that many hackers seriously underestimate their own market value. If you're the type of person that is compelled to learn new tech for its own sake, then the odds are you've learned far more than the guy that just got his CS degree because someone told him he could make a lot of money as a programmer. Don't sell yourself short.
The read brilliance of it, in my opinion, was that when you clicked the X in the corner to cloase it, it would just minimize. When I first saw that last september... I was extatic.
Uggh, that was something I really hated about the UI. The exit icon should always exit a program. It's too fundamental an aspect of the Windows UI to mess around with.
A better way to do it would be like mIRC's interface, where you can set the minimize button to minimize to the tray. That way you can "hide" the program but still get a true exit when you want it.
I've worked two contracts for Microsoft. I just started the second a couple of weeks ago. Let me dispel some misinformation in this thread.
Yes, there are two types of cardkeys at Microsoft -- blue and orange (I've never heard them called yellow).
Contractors have orange cards. They give you 24/7 access to the building you work in, and access to other MS buildings during business hours. The lone exception to this is the Microsoft press building, curiously enough.
It's not at all like the previous poster said, that "yellow" badges only let you in "a few buildings during business hours".
I don't know if there are access restrictions on blue badges as I've never had one.
I've certainly never had reason to complain about the access given by an orange card since I've never had any reason to be in a building where I don't work after hours.
Several months ago relations between contractors and MS employees were getting pretty rough. This was mainly because of a lawsuit which determined that long-time contractors (permatemps) were entitled to some form of recompense due to never being given the stock options that MS employees had.
This really pissed off a lot of MS employees, who felt with some justification that they had sacrificed a large amount of their life to get those stock options. Remember, contractors are often more highly paid than MS employees, who count on the stock options for a big payoff when they're vested.
Several bullshit manoevres went down which seemed to stem from this resentment. For example, in my department all the contractors were yanked from their offices and placed in "bays", which are basically hallways crammed full of desks. There were seven of us stuffed into the bay where I worked.
I don't think crap like this came from "on high", it was just pissed off middle managers.
The executive reaction to this lawsuit seemed to be to try to eliminate the "permatemp" class of worker. But since MS relies on these people, they couldn't get rid of them, so for the most part they offered them full time jobs.
This was a pretty happy outcome, all in all. I looked up a lot of the contractors I worked with during my last contract there, which was only about 5 months ago, and everyone had blue badges now. They seemed quite happy with the way things worked out, and obviously, it totally eliminated the employee/contractor friction.
I'm still a contractor, and likely to remain one. So far, I haven't seen an ounce of disdain from any of the people I work with. I'm treated like a full time employee now. I've got my own office.
So to summarize, the conflict between employees and contractors at MS was once a very real thing, though it was nowhere near the levels you'd expect from reading Slashdot. But it's pretty much a thing of the past now, at least in the departments of MS that I've had contact with.
I think Netscape has been way behind ever since IE 3.0 came out. Netscape has been holding back the development of the internet for years. It's about time the standards bodies blasted them. Now if only the "true believers" would wake up and sniff reality.
Some browser-detection JavaScript redirects people to either the standards-compliant tree or the lobotomized-for-Netscrape tree.
I really like that phrase, "Lobotomized for Netscape". I think I'll make a graphic for that, like those "optimized for..." graphics that were in vogue a few years ago, and start putting it on all pages I have to "modify" for Netscape.
Then feel free to take care of this in the constitutionally mandated way: Have your congressman or senators propose an amendment to repeal the 2nd Amendment. Plenty of people probably agree with you, and you only have to convince most of the state legislatures. It could happen...and while I wouldn't support the substance, I would accept that you're trying to improve the country in a way that supports the basic precepts upon which it was founded....instead of requesting that it be ignored because it doesn't matter anymore.
I agree with you entirely on this point. I think both sides on this issue should have the balls to propose a rewrite of this amendment. If gun ownership should be a universal individual right, let it be written as such. If guns are to banned, or severely curtailed, let the gun grabbers do it with a constitutional amendment.
Or I guess we could all argue about the meaning of that one horribly written sentence for another 200 years.
I've seen several reviews where people were pissed off about the director "adding" the holocaust connection. I haven't read the X-Men in about 10 years, so I don't know if that part of Magneto's past has been played down, but it used to be a major part of his character before that.
I even remember an issue I had that's at least 20 years old where it's revealed that Magneto's powers didn't manifest until shortly after the war. The first thing he did is sign on with the Israeli government as a nazi hunter. As you can imagine, when he found Nazis, he didn't turn them over for trial, either.
And where does Katz get the idea that we're supposed to "hate" Magneto? Xavier "hated" him so much that he entrusted his youngest students, the New Mutants, to Magneto's care at one point. Magneto's ambiguity was always one of the strongest points of the comic. A reader can't help but respect the man even if he disagrees with his methods. And is Magneto really that paranoid? It could be argued that Xavier is the one that is the dreamer, out of touch with reality -- but it is a beautiful dream.