I also prefer to look for in a book when I have to deal with programming involving unusual mathematics. Usually you do not need to go through the full course (and brain-melting) when all you need is to understand a particular case for a particular use you are programming.
Yes, one of the awesome fact of this time is that we have amazing access to knowledge today. However, I do not think it makes understanding of the basic concepts irrelevant. you have to know where to look to find what you need to look at.
And there's a shit ton of CRUD apps that people want written that don't need anything of the sort.
Sure. But how much stuff you going to want to know after the crud app is finished?
I alwys say this to the people who thiink they will just learn one thing, and make a career out of it.
You won't.
Now that the nice lady kows how ot cut and past the hex for "red" into the web page she's designing, does this mean she is now qualified to make any web page possible? No she is not.
Fact is, we have no idea what specific parts we learn will be of any use, forever. Which means the "what I need to know to do some specific job and that only" crowd are going to find themselves unemployed in short order. Just like a coworker that refused to learn about digital photography. Because fil was what she knew.
I discovered that a long tie ago, when I became interested in a photo chemical compendium from World war two. I perused through it, and soon became a "genius" as I came up with new processing methods to do some very technical photography. That all happened because there was a lot of knowledge in there that was discarded - not important - of no use for the state of photography at the time.
And then with the advent of digital photography - it all became of little use. But I knew about enough different things that I was still valuable _ hell, i even did computer support for a decent sized institute.
I had already learned this one pricelss fact. There is no knowledge that is of no use. I suppose I had known that t some level even when I was a child, what with reading the encyclopedia and dictionaries for fun. But my epiphany served me very well.
So yes, if somoene wants to hire a person who knows how to lookup on Google the hex value of a red background for a web page, there's your person. Of course, that's all they can do. Worth minimum wage if that.
The problem of course is that people with knowledge will just do that offhand, then move on to an actual engaging task.
Yeah, this is why all this push to get women into IT is annoying as hell. Has anyone actually *asked* them why they're not interested?
In the Take our sons and daughters to work da Activities I participated in for many years, we did poll the young ladies - and the "sons part of that was only added after some sexism complaints, but we all knew it was really about the young ladies.
STEM wasn't at all n their radar. They were interested largely in becoming veterinarians, Doctors, MBAs, and a low but still surprising number wanted to be entertainers. These were sons and daughters of engineers, scientists, technicians and programmers. People who largely encouraged and told their daughters they could be anything they want ot be. The part of my demonstrations that was well recieved was 3-D animation and photography. Computing and database work? You could see the girls eyes glaze over.
They simply were not interested, not one little bit.
And there were no mentions from parents regarding how their daughters were being ostracized or sexually harassed by the boys. They just were not interested. in that kind of career.
One thing that some of us came up with was that the young ladies might have seen their fathers coming home late at night after going in early the morning before, and on and on and on and on while they were growing up, maybe missing out on a trip to Disneyland when their classmates did, because dad or mom was working on some hot project. Then another hot project, than another.
Considering that my son saw the many all nighter's I did, the 60 - 80 hour weeks, the many canceled vacations - I canceled many more vacations than I ever took - and decided "Fuck that shit!"
I was sort of lucky in that while I worked my ass off, I was well respected. Pay was good also.
But both of those were the exception, and I did many different things, pretty well. Most of the IT folks were looked at as rather lowly.
I'll bet the poor reputation of the career (as you point out) is one big, big reason. You have to know all kinds of arcane crap, you have to go through hard degree programs in college, the pay isn't all that great, workers are laid off all the time, and the social factor sucks. Women are usually much more social than men anyway (especially compared to IT/engineering men), so why would they be interested? If a woman's smart she'll probably go into finance, law, or medicine instead.
Hehe, I started commenting before I read your whole post, and look how the polling results I posted line up very well with your comments!
I interviewed at a place that had some of that, like an air-hockey table. I didn't see anyone using it. Maybe it got some use over lunch break, but stuff like that seems like a waste because if you use it, then you're obviously not working, and that isn't going to look good if you use it too much. You could use it after work in your off-hours, but who wants to spend their spare after-work time at work? By then you're ready to get home and eat something.
What are these "off-hours" of which you speak?
I've always thought that aside form the lack of respect you get, the every job can cost you your job, the working out of the basement, and the meh pay, that one of the impediments of IT for women is the insane hours that are demanded of you.
But other than that, it's the best damn job in the world - who could hate it?
That would kinda mess up the story now wouldn't it?
This is just a techno FUD story for people who can't stand Google or self driving vehicles to point to and yell "See, SEE? I told you these things will never work!"
Theat they have to point to 6 year old data is sort of telling.
Television in all forms is finding out that if we are fed a constant diet of catheter ads, Jesus Christ SUE someone, and medicine advertisments that sound like something designed to kill you, and vaginal mesh and mesothelioma ads - the content better be incredibly good. And it's not. People are cutting their Cable TV subscriptions.
Which is all to say, people only put up with so much shit. If i have to watch the malware ads, and cannot turn them off, I'll just find something else to do with my time.
That is no problem, but they must not be allowed to advertise it as an unlimited plan. It also indicates that the government must work on strengthening free competition.
Do I have to pay for the gigabytes of malware advertisements they try to force feed me?
I am willing to stipulate that global warming happens and concerns may have some bearing, if you will just agree that toxic chemical releases and water contamination are a bigger more immediately pressing issue that GW should not distract us from.
But it isn't an either/or situation. People can think about multiple things. We have water cleanup in my area, but that doesn't mean that when I think about acid drainage mitigation, that Greenhouse gas just gets pushed out.
Also, we have done most of what is within our power regarding GW, and if we weren't so distracted, we could have much more beneficial improvementsif our officials would concentrate on fixing things that are the most seriously broken that they can have the greatest positive impact on.
If I might make a financial example. I started saving for retirement when I was pretty young. I didn't live like a pauper, but my house was a ittle less expensive, and my cars were kept a few extra years. But I didn't lose sight of either my retirement funds or my standard of living.
Long view plus short view. Gotta have it. Without the long view, teh short view is pointless, just like my co workers who are now trying to figure out how they can retire.
Especially when we have credible scientists warning that the EPA is so negligent in the latest accident that it seemed like it could have been a planned accident to get their way politically.
Bolshy yarblockos. As batshit insanely angry as people who hate the EPA with a white hot passion have suddenly become tree hugging environmentalists........ Let us not forget just who the hell put that mine drainage there in the first place.
It's the crocodile tears of the suddenly a talking point environmentalists, who in similar form are outraged that compact florescent light bulbs have a tiny bit of mercury in them, yet have been throwing their 4 foot long lamps out in the regular garbage since forever.
I'lll be that the loudest voices of outrage wouldn't dream of passing a regulation that would require the people who actually caused the initial problem to have to reduce their profits by the evil regulations. Regulations are bad. Regulations are Socialist. And teh cmpanies would clean up after themselves always if we didn't have these outlandish reguations and groups like teh EPA around. Right?
I'm giving the EPA the benefit of the doubt that they were just grossly negligent ---- if BP, or a private cleanup company had committed a clearly incorrect decision with these kinds of disastrous results, there would be billion dollar fines and likely executives going to jail.
So what should we do? Eliminate the EPA? We certainly aren't going to give them more people or oversight.
All of the blame might ring a little more true if the EPA caused the initial problem. But last time I checked, the EPA doesn't operate any Gold mines.
But to your point of doing things for today, my view of today's issues is colord by my location, and seeing what happens in an unregulated environment. I could take you on tours of red running rivers, where the rocks are permanently stained, and no life exists. Rivers where people are advised to use fiberglass or plastic canoes instead of aluminum, which comes out of the river shiny after the first use, then after every scratch from the red stained rocks, starts the water eating away at the metal in earnest. Where the pH is lower than vinegar. It was once a very popular fishing stream. It once brought in tourists.
I could show you large tracts of once beautiful mountain land which are now covered with highwalls - completely ruined for any purpose at all. No one could use them now for forestry or logging, no one could use them for housing once civilization gets close enough. No
Instead of being concerned about the REAL environmental issues.... such as plastics and pollution of our bodies of water, hazardous chemical releases by our own government's negligence, and corruption of potable water supplies.
I don't believe in that either. There is no global warming, and no poisoning or pollution of anything.
There are bacteria and eukaryotes that have been found consuming plastic in the ocean. It's only a matter of time until a bird consumes an "infected plastic" with said organism on it and isn't just killed off. Eventually, if we keep pouring plastic into the environment, this evolution will happen, but it could take thousands / millions of years.
Bacteria != an evolved animal. More likely, if any flying critters end up able to digest petrochemical plastic, that will be after the present ones have died off, and the chemical pathways to extract energy from plastics are initiated. Of course, this new food supply will be very limited, because humans will not likely be producing petrochemical plastics for those millions of years - if we are still around.
For all purposes, petrochemical plastics function much better as a poison than a food source.
It is far more likely that some sort of weird emergent evolution will go an and birds will start to be able to digest plastic.
I can see upsides to it, but birst may start to taste funny after that;).
So you figure that if we put a thousand people in a room and allow them nothing to eat but rocks, you'll come back in 10 years, and they'll all have evolved to eat rocks? Most plastic has no particular nutrients, although there are exceptions like casein derived plastic, or Henry Ford's unsuccessful soybean plastic for automobile body panels.
It's always good to understand that 99+ percent of all species have gone extinct. And often because of changing environment.
One bird feasts on food that would leave most other animals stone dead
Underground Lightning reminds me of a co-worker of mine.
He maintained that there was no need for any regulation of any dangerous chemicals, whether it was asbestos, sewage, or radioactive waste.
He insisted "We'll adapt to all that stuff". He never did have a good answer to my mentioning that adapt means that maybe two people out of a million might survive, and not very well at that.
And lest he get too smug, there are these weird little microspheres of plastic that are getting into the oceans. It turns out some manufacturers of skin exfoliants have switched away from traditional exfoliants like ground apricot seeds to these microspheres. Not for any good reason - they certainly don't work better.
But the plastics involved make it to the ocean, and they last a long long time, to be eaten by fish and other little sea critters.
One adverse effect is that they are estrogen mimics, and can mess up males reproductive organs. And eventually it gets back to us.
I suspect our guy might have eaten a lot of that fish already, because he's being a bit of a cunt.
Luckily, there weren't any at the time. So nothing had to be changed. When you are first exploring an area, the first person to name something on paper wins and that is the name that it should always have.
And that name is Denali.
As I noted in another post, I don't get to rename people when I meet them for the first time (Although GW Bush was known for that, and I guess some of the new names were hilarious)
That dude that named it Mt McKinley was way late to the table.
Slashdot Mirror
I also prefer to look for in a book when I have to deal with programming involving unusual mathematics. Usually you do not need to go through the full course (and brain-melting) when all you need is to understand a particular case for a particular use you are programming.
Yes, one of the awesome fact of this time is that we have amazing access to knowledge today. However, I do not think it makes understanding of the basic concepts irrelevant. you have to know where to look to find what you need to look at.
And there's a shit ton of CRUD apps that people want written that don't need anything of the sort.
Sure. But how much stuff you going to want to know after the crud app is finished?
I alwys say this to the people who thiink they will just learn one thing, and make a career out of it.
You won't.
Now that the nice lady kows how ot cut and past the hex for "red" into the web page she's designing, does this mean she is now qualified to make any web page possible? No she is not.
Fact is, we have no idea what specific parts we learn will be of any use, forever. Which means the "what I need to know to do some specific job and that only" crowd are going to find themselves unemployed in short order. Just like a coworker that refused to learn about digital photography. Because fil was what she knew.
I discovered that a long tie ago, when I became interested in a photo chemical compendium from World war two. I perused through it, and soon became a "genius" as I came up with new processing methods to do some very technical photography. That all happened because there was a lot of knowledge in there that was discarded - not important - of no use for the state of photography at the time.
And then with the advent of digital photography - it all became of little use. But I knew about enough different things that I was still valuable _ hell, i even did computer support for a decent sized institute.
I had already learned this one pricelss fact. There is no knowledge that is of no use. I suppose I had known that t some level even when I was a child, what with reading the encyclopedia and dictionaries for fun. But my epiphany served me very well.
So yes, if somoene wants to hire a person who knows how to lookup on Google the hex value of a red background for a web page, there's your person. Of course, that's all they can do. Worth minimum wage if that.
The problem of course is that people with knowledge will just do that offhand, then move on to an actual engaging task.
By that standard, this post is is in code. English code.
Yes, you are not incorrect.
She wants her web pages to be red. To her, this is "programming". What color does she want her database to be? Then she can be an SQL programmer!
I understand her next project will be to create a national wireless system... After all, how hard can it be to not put up wires?
also from Dilbert.
Ignorance should never be treated as a virtue. And yet that is what is happening and this original post proves that this attitude is still alive.
Ever watch reality TV? A true celebration of stupidity
" Anyone else read that as "why people dont like tentacular 3D"
Sounds like it'd be popular in the Japanese home market.
My son, who was into anime some years ago, once showed me an artwork of that. Truly there are different srokes for different folks.
Yeah, this is why all this push to get women into IT is annoying as hell. Has anyone actually *asked* them why they're not interested?
In the Take our sons and daughters to work da Activities I participated in for many years, we did poll the young ladies - and the "sons part of that was only added after some sexism complaints, but we all knew it was really about the young ladies.
STEM wasn't at all n their radar. They were interested largely in becoming veterinarians, Doctors, MBAs, and a low but still surprising number wanted to be entertainers. These were sons and daughters of engineers, scientists, technicians and programmers. People who largely encouraged and told their daughters they could be anything they want ot be. The part of my demonstrations that was well recieved was 3-D animation and photography. Computing and database work? You could see the girls eyes glaze over. They simply were not interested, not one little bit.
And there were no mentions from parents regarding how their daughters were being ostracized or sexually harassed by the boys. They just were not interested. in that kind of career.
One thing that some of us came up with was that the young ladies might have seen their fathers coming home late at night after going in early the morning before, and on and on and on and on while they were growing up, maybe missing out on a trip to Disneyland when their classmates did, because dad or mom was working on some hot project. Then another hot project, than another.
Considering that my son saw the many all nighter's I did, the 60 - 80 hour weeks, the many canceled vacations - I canceled many more vacations than I ever took - and decided "Fuck that shit!"
I was sort of lucky in that while I worked my ass off, I was well respected. Pay was good also.
But both of those were the exception, and I did many different things, pretty well. Most of the IT folks were looked at as rather lowly.
I'll bet the poor reputation of the career (as you point out) is one big, big reason. You have to know all kinds of arcane crap, you have to go through hard degree programs in college, the pay isn't all that great, workers are laid off all the time, and the social factor sucks. Women are usually much more social than men anyway (especially compared to IT/engineering men), so why would they be interested? If a woman's smart she'll probably go into finance, law, or medicine instead.
Hehe, I started commenting before I read your whole post, and look how the polling results I posted line up very well with your comments!
I'm sure he's drooling in a well-defined pattern to make an array of small droplets on the screen. And that's why people don't like lenticular 3D.
" Anyone else read that as "why people dont like tentacular 3D"
I can't think of anything that doesn't suck sadly.
"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."
- Henry David Thoreau
Plausible, possibly women have evolved an ability to put up with more stupid evil shit as a survival tactic to deal with the patriarchy?
Big Red sends her greetings.
Have you ever worked in a unionized environment before?
Ther are now a lot more people with apocryphal hate stories about union their experiece than there are Union employees.
They are damn near gone! You were successful. You killed them. Crack a beer and celebrate.
But no, we're going to hear a lot of "first hand personal experience" stories for the next hundred years.
So celebrate your crowning achieveent that your employercan fire you for wearing the wrong color shirt. Or for the LULZ for that matter.
Because one thing is for certain. union or not, the employee remains the number one enemy.
I interviewed at a place that had some of that, like an air-hockey table. I didn't see anyone using it. Maybe it got some use over lunch break, but stuff like that seems like a waste because if you use it, then you're obviously not working, and that isn't going to look good if you use it too much. You could use it after work in your off-hours, but who wants to spend their spare after-work time at work? By then you're ready to get home and eat something.
What are these "off-hours" of which you speak?
I've always thought that aside form the lack of respect you get, the every job can cost you your job, the working out of the basement, and the meh pay, that one of the impediments of IT for women is the insane hours that are demanded of you.
But other than that, it's the best damn job in the world - who could hate it?
In real life, what's going to happen is the Chinese and the Russians will be the only ones strong in space exploration
In real life, we're going to go extinct soon.
what's going to happen is the Chinese will be the only ones strong in space exploration, while the Americans and their buddies sit
Kickass acid, eh?
Do we have a more current example?
That would kinda mess up the story now wouldn't it?
This is just a techno FUD story for people who can't stand Google or self driving vehicles to point to and yell "See, SEE? I told you these things will never work!"
Theat they have to point to 6 year old data is sort of telling.
if you type the URL into your browser, then yes.
Until they make adblock illegal, not so much.
Television in all forms is finding out that if we are fed a constant diet of catheter ads, Jesus Christ SUE someone, and medicine advertisments that sound like something designed to kill you, and vaginal mesh and mesothelioma ads - the content better be incredibly good. And it's not. People are cutting their Cable TV subscriptions.
Which is all to say, people only put up with so much shit. If i have to watch the malware ads, and cannot turn them off, I'll just find something else to do with my time.
That is no problem, but they must not be allowed to advertise it as an unlimited plan. It also indicates that the government must work on strengthening free competition.
Do I have to pay for the gigabytes of malware advertisements they try to force feed me?
I am willing to stipulate that global warming happens and concerns may have some bearing, if you will just agree that toxic chemical releases and water contamination are a bigger more immediately pressing issue that GW should not distract us from.
But it isn't an either/or situation. People can think about multiple things. We have water cleanup in my area, but that doesn't mean that when I think about acid drainage mitigation, that Greenhouse gas just gets pushed out.
Also, we have done most of what is within our power regarding GW, and if we weren't so distracted, we could have much more beneficial improvementsif our officials would concentrate on fixing things that are the most seriously broken that they can have the greatest positive impact on.
If I might make a financial example. I started saving for retirement when I was pretty young. I didn't live like a pauper, but my house was a ittle less expensive, and my cars were kept a few extra years. But I didn't lose sight of either my retirement funds or my standard of living.
Long view plus short view. Gotta have it. Without the long view, teh short view is pointless, just like my co workers who are now trying to figure out how they can retire.
Especially when we have credible scientists warning that the EPA is so negligent in the latest accident that it seemed like it could have been a planned accident to get their way politically.
Bolshy yarblockos. As batshit insanely angry as people who hate the EPA with a white hot passion have suddenly become tree hugging environmentalists. ....... Let us not forget just who the hell put that mine drainage there in the first place.
It's the crocodile tears of the suddenly a talking point environmentalists, who in similar form are outraged that compact florescent light bulbs have a tiny bit of mercury in them, yet have been throwing their 4 foot long lamps out in the regular garbage since forever.
I'lll be that the loudest voices of outrage wouldn't dream of passing a regulation that would require the people who actually caused the initial problem to have to reduce their profits by the evil regulations. Regulations are bad. Regulations are Socialist. And teh cmpanies would clean up after themselves always if we didn't have these outlandish reguations and groups like teh EPA around. Right?
I'm giving the EPA the benefit of the doubt that they were just grossly negligent ---- if BP, or a private cleanup company had committed a clearly incorrect decision with these kinds of disastrous results, there would be billion dollar fines and likely executives going to jail.
So what should we do? Eliminate the EPA? We certainly aren't going to give them more people or oversight.
All of the blame might ring a little more true if the EPA caused the initial problem. But last time I checked, the EPA doesn't operate any Gold mines.
But to your point of doing things for today, my view of today's issues is colord by my location, and seeing what happens in an unregulated environment. I could take you on tours of red running rivers, where the rocks are permanently stained, and no life exists. Rivers where people are advised to use fiberglass or plastic canoes instead of aluminum, which comes out of the river shiny after the first use, then after every scratch from the red stained rocks, starts the water eating away at the metal in earnest. Where the pH is lower than vinegar. It was once a very popular fishing stream. It once brought in tourists.
I could show you large tracts of once beautiful mountain land which are now covered with highwalls - completely ruined for any purpose at all. No one could use them now for forestry or logging, no one could use them for housing once civilization gets close enough. No
It is interesting that EVERY bit of data examined about the Shroud
It's an even bigger miracle that the shroud manged to stay hidden unti the middle ages, whne is suddenly popped up.
It ranks right up there with the Holy foreskin of Jesus on the veracity chart, and you'll never change your mind.
Instead of being concerned about the REAL environmental issues.... such as plastics and pollution of our bodies of water, hazardous chemical releases by our own government's negligence, and corruption of potable water supplies.
I don't believe in that either. There is no global warming, and no poisoning or pollution of anything.
See, I can deny better than you can.
There are bacteria and eukaryotes that have been found consuming plastic in the ocean. It's only a matter of time until a bird consumes an "infected plastic" with said organism on it and isn't just killed off. Eventually, if we keep pouring plastic into the environment, this evolution will happen, but it could take thousands / millions of years.
Bacteria != an evolved animal. More likely, if any flying critters end up able to digest petrochemical plastic, that will be after the present ones have died off, and the chemical pathways to extract energy from plastics are initiated. Of course, this new food supply will be very limited, because humans will not likely be producing petrochemical plastics for those millions of years - if we are still around.
For all purposes, petrochemical plastics function much better as a poison than a food source.
It is far more likely that some sort of weird emergent evolution will go an and birds will start to be able to digest plastic.
I can see upsides to it, but birst may start to taste funny after that ;) .
So you figure that if we put a thousand people in a room and allow them nothing to eat but rocks, you'll come back in 10 years, and they'll all have evolved to eat rocks? Most plastic has no particular nutrients, although there are exceptions like casein derived plastic, or Henry Ford's unsuccessful soybean plastic for automobile body panels.
It's always good to understand that 99+ percent of all species have gone extinct. And often because of changing environment.
A Diet To Die For
One bird feasts on food that would leave most other animals stone dead
Underground Lightning reminds me of a co-worker of mine.
He maintained that there was no need for any regulation of any dangerous chemicals, whether it was asbestos, sewage, or radioactive waste.
He insisted "We'll adapt to all that stuff". He never did have a good answer to my mentioning that adapt means that maybe two people out of a million might survive, and not very well at that.
And lest he get too smug, there are these weird little microspheres of plastic that are getting into the oceans. It turns out some manufacturers of skin exfoliants have switched away from traditional exfoliants like ground apricot seeds to these microspheres. Not for any good reason - they certainly don't work better.
But the plastics involved make it to the ocean, and they last a long long time, to be eaten by fish and other little sea critters.
One adverse effect is that they are estrogen mimics, and can mess up males reproductive organs. And eventually it gets back to us.
I suspect our guy might have eaten a lot of that fish already, because he's being a bit of a cunt.
The people complaining about the cost of changing maps are not actually worried about the cost of changing maps.
Correct, they are still mad the present occupant is not of the right pigmentation to suit them - all the outrage occam's to that.
Luckily, there weren't any at the time. So nothing had to be changed. When you are first exploring an area, the first person to name something on paper wins and that is the name that it should always have.
And that name is Denali.
As I noted in another post, I don't get to rename people when I meet them for the first time (Although GW Bush was known for that, and I guess some of the new names were hilarious) That dude that named it Mt McKinley was way late to the table.