On a related note, I would point out that US workers get much less vacation time on average than Europeans. Among blue-collar workers, it is not unusual to get no paid leave, and even workers in well-paying salaried positions may get only 2-3 weeks of paid leave per year, which must be used for all time off, including illness, doctor's appointments, staying home for the plumber, etc.
Absolutely. My wife works in an office job which pays hourly, and she got no paid vacation at all during her first year (5 days after a year, 10 days after two years), and she accumulates four hours of sick time per month. That isn't a lot to work with.
My vacation situation is *much* better, but I can't use most of my time on vacations because she doesn't have the vacation time to match. That means I end up taking a lot of Friday afternoons off just to burn the time before the end of the year.
It is the Christian faith alone that can account for logic, reason, and rationality.
I would think that any religion which incorporates the concept of a rational "creator" would qualify, assuming that rationality is dependent on the existence of a creator in the first place (something I do not personally believe).
Why should anyone be rational if the Christian God does not exist?
Why wouldn't they be? Rational thought is a definition created by man, and such humanocentric concepts do not require the presence of a supreme being. The world as perceived is the world as is. Man is the measure of all things. I think, therefore I am.
Why are men under any obligation to be rational in a materialistic universe?
A non-Christian universe is not always materialistic. Just ask most native Americans, or most of the Wiccans I know. Or a buddhist monk, for that matter.
Men are not obligated to be rational in a Christian universe, either. That's why a "leap of faith" is often required in order to understand or accept commonly believed Christian doctrine.
How about comparing these large (and apparently largely unsuccessful) school districts with school districts that are better able to educate kids?
Are there differences between the two sets besides sheer size?
Differences in student backgrounds? In student motivations?
Perhaps urban environments create social or economic factors which demotivate the student population?
Without some basis for comparison, the article is little more than a hype job. It's quite possible that the school district itself is not the core source of the problems being seen...
I'll be using it as my primary platform until I'm bored or frustrated with it. It's kinda neat to see the latest Firefox variants running on a stock machine from late 1996 (PPro/200 with 192MB, SCSI hard drives, and 4MB Matrox Millenium).
Of course, I also have Linux (Puppy, DSL, Mandrake) and Win95/2k boxes on the LAN/KVM, but OS/2 is my most comfy environment. Still. Sad, but true.:-)
The "reality" of a family in a small town in Nebraska is quite different from the "reality" that a single person living in a major city experiences. Neither reality is better; they're just different ways of viewing life and its associated recreational or social priorities.
Folks who interact a lot with technology are no different -- they simply have a set of experiences and priorities that differs from other groups of people.
As long as it doesn't hurt other people, what's the big deal?
Some of us think OS/2 is still pretty decent, at least given its age.:-) Given the functionality of the OS/2 desktop, one wonders exactly how XP and Vista manage to use all of those resources...
Bombadil isn't the issue with many of us (he's an anomaly in the books as well).
I had serious issues with the movie's handling of Faramir and Denethor, with the nonchalant behavior of the ents, and with specific scenes like the end of the Battle of the Pelanor Fields (what happened to the wonderful scene where an exhausted Eomer held his sword up in defiance as the Cosairs rounded the bend in the river, then threw his sword into the air with joy as he saw the banner of the High King unfurling in the wind?) and Gandalf's confrontation with Saruman (the extended version did a cover bit of that, but the dialog in the book is *far* stronger, IMO).
I don't think PJ's changes in those areas added to the movie, and they weren't changes done for time considerations, either. Some of them seemed little more than arbitrary.
I can understand dropping the Scourge of the Shire due to time restraints, but that chapter's removal also removes a very important message from the trilogy.
Most of my drives are older SCSI drives (some 50-pin Ultra-SCSI, others 68-pin UW), mainly Seagate 2/4/9GB drives and IBM 18GB drives, and the vast majority of them have been running almost continuously (powered up, not necessary being used) for the past several years.
I think I've had one Barracuda die during that time (a 4.5GB U-SCSI drive I'd picked up on eBay for very little which used to be used on an AOL data server).
While I am like most of Slashdot in that I think that Microsoft has a very tight grip on the computer market, I still will never understand why the EU is so against Microsoft.
The US would be seen that way as well if it actually had the balls to enforce its own anti-trust laws.
That's also the reason Windows is extremely bloated.
No, it isn't. OS/2 and Linux+Wine or WABI could run several 16-bit Windows programs concurrently and smoothly in an amount of RAM that XP or Vista won't even BOOT in. Something else is causing the bloat.
There's more to the story than legacy compatibility.
Best in the industry? Please. I can still compile and run both MASM and Fortran software written in 1966 for a ancient UNIVAC 1108 mainframe on a modern Unisys Clearpath Dorado mainframe using the latest version of OS2200, and software compiled after the mid-70's can be run as is on the modern box without recompiling it at all.
Microsoft isn't even the best in the Intel world. Compare the level of DOS compatibility in Windows XP or Vista to that found in eComStation 1.2R, for example. Heck, compare the level of compatibility found in Windows 95 and/or NT 3.1 or NT 4 to eComStation. IBM wrote a virtual machine to handle DOS programs inside a true 32-bit architecture, and it will run all kinds of software that the VDMs in NT, Win2K, and XP can't dream of handling.
Microsoft has continuously placed a priority on customer migration to the next version of their native API over any support for legacy software, and their product lines have a long history of systematically phasing out older APIs. The "backwards compatibility" card was played to the hilt in the Windows 9x days in an attempt to explain that fact that Windows 9x was little more than a sophisticated-but-piecemeal 32-bit shell running on top of a copy of real DOS, while Microsoft's support for DOS software in its real 32-bit offerings has been pathetic.
You bought the MS party line hook line and sinker, but that *doesn't* make it reality.
Man, I miss the original MTV with Martha Quinn...:-) Of course, I was a freshman in college during its first year, so its timing was absolutely perfect as far as I was concerned!
Minidistros like Puppy Linux, DSL, Feather Linux, INSERT (from the Ultimate Boot CD), and Austrumi all work just fine on a PPro/200 with 192MB of RAM (of which I have several), and even Gentoo boots and runs in an acceptable manner. SLAX also works (at least the Popcorn Edition CD I tried).
Not all Linux distros are bloated, thankfully, or even default to GNOME or KDE.
Oh, I'm in touch with a couple folks there on a regular basis, but the fact that my wife and I are currently 1200 miles away (I had to move from Minneapolis to Atlanta to find work) would make it more difficult. As far as I know they aren't hiring in my old group, anyway.
At some future time, perhaps.
Regarding OS/2 -- the easiest way to get it working on a modern system is to go the eComStation route. Learn more about eComStation here, and get a demo CD here...
Make that, "My formal title was Senior Applications Analyst, and that was the same as most of the folks on the team who had more experience than I did. The few I can think of who were Applications Specialists (the only title above Senior Analyst at the time) were 25- or 30-year people, and one of them had been working in the same environment at a previous airline for over 22 years before he came to NWA in 1989. In 1996 he had worked on the same set of apps for 30 years. He was good, too. Short and grumpy at times, but very good.:-)
Some folks choose horizontal career development (keeping up with the Joneses and learning a wide array of skills), while others choose vertical career development (either trying to climb the management tree or trying to become an expert in a very complex area of technology).
All of them can be successful career paths, and all of them can fail (or be pulled out from under you) at a moment's notice. Over the course of a 30-year career, changes are undesired changes will hit you at least once regardless of the path you're been focusing on.
When I got my BSCS in 1987, there was no real difference. One could choose between a few different course tracks in the last two years of the undergraduate degree (systems programming, scientific programming, and MIS were the three different branches offered at Mankato State at the time), so I did get my fill of compiler/OS/language theory and such as a systems programming type, but the first two years were spend working on practical coursework (core languages, job control languages, language interfaces, data structures, logic gates, systems analysis and design in teams, etc.). It was good preparation for a programming career as well.
At that time there wasn't much math required by the program (matricies and statistics, I think), but I made up for some of that with a Math minor.
I did take a leadership role in some projects/committees, but so did several others.
So use that on your resume.
Oh, absolutely. If you can't outline your own strengths on your resume, you probably need to rewrite it -- that's what a resume is supposed to be used for.:-)
We will ask you about it in the interview, and if you bullsh!t us, then don't expect to have it work out, but you don't need permission from your employer to take on responsibility. Be proactive. Use a little initiative.
I've always taken the initiative (as you can see from the numerous examples on my now-somewhat-dates resume on my web site), and I tend to do very well in interviews. My interview-to-job-offer ratio has been very close to 2:1 over the course of my 18-year career.
The problem I had back when I was last looking for work (2002-2004) was getting past the technical keyword filters and other obstacles to actually get a phone (or face-to-face) interview. Once I got to that point, it was relatively smooth sailing.
Yeah, but I chose to be a programmer in the airline industry, and when 9/11 hit not enough of my teammates had retired yet. If 9/11 would have happened now, I'd still be there (a number of key people have retired).
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. My wife works in an office job which pays hourly, and she got no paid vacation at all during her first year (5 days after a year, 10 days after two years), and she accumulates four hours of sick time per month. That isn't a lot to work with.
My vacation situation is *much* better, but I can't use most of my time on vacations because she doesn't have the vacation time to match. That means I end up taking a lot of Friday afternoons off just to burn the time before the end of the year.
I would think that any religion which incorporates the concept of a rational "creator" would qualify, assuming that rationality is dependent on the existence of a creator in the first place (something I do not personally believe).
Why wouldn't they be? Rational thought is a definition created by man, and such humanocentric concepts do not require the presence of a supreme being. The world as perceived is the world as is. Man is the measure of all things. I think, therefore I am.
A non-Christian universe is not always materialistic. Just ask most native Americans, or most of the Wiccans I know. Or a buddhist monk, for that matter.
Men are not obligated to be rational in a Christian universe, either. That's why a "leap of faith" is often required in order to understand or accept commonly believed Christian doctrine.
How about comparing these large (and apparently largely unsuccessful) school districts with school districts that are better able to educate kids?
Are there differences between the two sets besides sheer size?
Differences in student backgrounds? In student motivations?
Perhaps urban environments create social or economic factors which demotivate the student population?
Without some basis for comparison, the article is little more than a hype job. It's quite possible that the school district itself is not the core source of the problems being seen...
I'll be using it as my primary platform until I'm bored or frustrated with it. It's kinda neat to see the latest Firefox variants running on a stock machine from late 1996 (PPro/200 with 192MB, SCSI hard drives, and 4MB Matrox Millenium).
:-)
Of course, I also have Linux (Puppy, DSL, Mandrake) and Win95/2k boxes on the LAN/KVM, but OS/2 is my most comfy environment. Still. Sad, but true.
A program's icon was stored in the EA, also. You could store 64k of metadata per file, I think.
:-)
Mac resource forks are somewhat similar, but I think the Mac did it first.
The few, the proud, the myopi^H^H^H^H^Helite! :-)
The "reality" of a family in a small town in Nebraska is quite different from the "reality" that a single person living in a major city experiences. Neither reality is better; they're just different ways of viewing life and its associated recreational or social priorities.
Folks who interact a lot with technology are no different -- they simply have a set of experiences and priorities that differs from other groups of people.
As long as it doesn't hurt other people, what's the big deal?
Some of us think OS/2 is still pretty decent, at least given its age. :-) Given the functionality of the OS/2 desktop, one wonders exactly how XP and Vista manage to use all of those resources...
(Posted using Firefox 1.5.0.8 under Warp 4 FP 15)
Bombadil isn't the issue with many of us (he's an anomaly in the books as well).
I had serious issues with the movie's handling of Faramir and Denethor, with the nonchalant behavior of the ents, and with specific scenes like the end of the Battle of the Pelanor Fields (what happened to the wonderful scene where an exhausted Eomer held his sword up in defiance as the Cosairs rounded the bend in the river, then threw his sword into the air with joy as he saw the banner of the High King unfurling in the wind?) and Gandalf's confrontation with Saruman (the extended version did a cover bit of that, but the dialog in the book is *far* stronger, IMO).
I don't think PJ's changes in those areas added to the movie, and they weren't changes done for time considerations, either. Some of them seemed little more than arbitrary.
I can understand dropping the Scourge of the Shire due to time restraints, but that chapter's removal also removes a very important message from the trilogy.
Happy birthday! (grunt!)
Happy birthday! (grunt!)
Misery and Despair,
People dying everywhere.
Happy Birthday! (grunt!)
Happy Birthday! (grunt!)
I have no idea where we got it, but Google shows that we aren't the only folks who know the song.
It isn't illegal if the license permits reuse in proprietary products, and the BSDL does.
Pixels are so boring, and all those colors just confuse me. :-)
Most of my drives are older SCSI drives (some 50-pin Ultra-SCSI, others 68-pin UW), mainly Seagate 2/4/9GB drives and IBM 18GB drives, and the vast majority of them have been running almost continuously (powered up, not necessary being used) for the past several years.
I think I've had one Barracuda die during that time (a 4.5GB U-SCSI drive I'd picked up on eBay for very little which used to be used on an AOL data server).
No, it isn't. OS/2 and Linux+Wine or WABI could run several 16-bit Windows programs concurrently and smoothly in an amount of RAM that XP or Vista won't even BOOT in. Something else is causing the bloat.
There's more to the story than legacy compatibility.
Best in the industry? Please. I can still compile and run both MASM and Fortran software written in 1966 for a ancient UNIVAC 1108 mainframe on a modern Unisys Clearpath Dorado mainframe using the latest version of OS2200, and software compiled after the mid-70's can be run as is on the modern box without recompiling it at all.
Microsoft isn't even the best in the Intel world. Compare the level of DOS compatibility in Windows XP or Vista to that found in eComStation 1.2R, for example. Heck, compare the level of compatibility found in Windows 95 and/or NT 3.1 or NT 4 to eComStation. IBM wrote a virtual machine to handle DOS programs inside a true 32-bit architecture, and it will run all kinds of software that the VDMs in NT, Win2K, and XP can't dream of handling.
Microsoft has continuously placed a priority on customer migration to the next version of their native API over any support for legacy software, and their product lines have a long history of systematically phasing out older APIs. The "backwards compatibility" card was played to the hilt in the Windows 9x days in an attempt to explain that fact that Windows 9x was little more than a sophisticated-but-piecemeal 32-bit shell running on top of a copy of real DOS, while Microsoft's support for DOS software in its real 32-bit offerings has been pathetic.
You bought the MS party line hook line and sinker, but that *doesn't* make it reality.
Man, I miss the original MTV with Martha Quinn... :-) Of course, I was a freshman in college during its first year, so its timing was absolutely perfect as far as I was concerned!
Minidistros like Puppy Linux, DSL, Feather Linux, INSERT (from the Ultimate Boot CD), and Austrumi all work just fine on a PPro/200 with 192MB of RAM (of which I have several), and even Gentoo boots and runs in an acceptable manner. SLAX also works (at least the Popcorn Edition CD I tried).
Not all Linux distros are bloated, thankfully, or even default to GNOME or KDE.
At some future time, perhaps.
Regarding OS/2 -- the easiest way to get it working on a modern system is to go the eComStation route. Learn more about eComStation here, and get a demo CD here...
Make that, "My formal title was Senior Applications Analyst, and that was the same as most of the folks on the team who had more experience than I did. The few I can think of who were Applications Specialists (the only title above Senior Analyst at the time) were 25- or 30-year people, and one of them had been working in the same environment at a previous airline for over 22 years before he came to NWA in 1989. In 1996 he had worked on the same set of apps for 30 years. He was good, too. Short and grumpy at times, but very good. :-)
(Er... Hi, Don!)
I don't know, but if I find one I'll certainly let you know about it ... after I've interviewed and accepted the offer. :-)
Some folks choose horizontal career development (keeping up with the Joneses and learning a wide array of skills), while others choose vertical career development (either trying to climb the management tree or trying to become an expert in a very complex area of technology).
All of them can be successful career paths, and all of them can fail (or be pulled out from under you) at a moment's notice. Over the course of a 30-year career, changes are undesired changes will hit you at least once regardless of the path you're been focusing on.
When I got my BSCS in 1987, there was no real difference. One could choose between a few different course tracks in the last two years of the undergraduate degree (systems programming, scientific programming, and MIS were the three different branches offered at Mankato State at the time), so I did get my fill of compiler/OS/language theory and such as a systems programming type, but the first two years were spend working on practical coursework (core languages, job control languages, language interfaces, data structures, logic gates, systems analysis and design in teams, etc.). It was good preparation for a programming career as well.
At that time there wasn't much math required by the program (matricies and statistics, I think), but I made up for some of that with a Math minor.
Oh, absolutely. If you can't outline your own strengths on your resume, you probably need to rewrite it -- that's what a resume is supposed to be used for. :-)
I've always taken the initiative (as you can see from the numerous examples on my now-somewhat-dates resume on my web site), and I tend to do very well in interviews. My interview-to-job-offer ratio has been very close to 2:1 over the course of my 18-year career.
The problem I had back when I was last looking for work (2002-2004) was getting past the technical keyword filters and other obstacles to actually get a phone (or face-to-face) interview. Once I got to that point, it was relatively smooth sailing.
Yeah, but I chose to be a programmer in the airline industry, and when 9/11 hit not enough of my teammates had retired yet. If 9/11 would have happened now, I'd still be there (a number of key people have retired).