Construction is a dead end in most parts of the country as well. The high cost of liability insurance and such means that only large firms are surviving, and at least over here on the West coast, just about all of them hire piles of semi-skilled Mexican migrants/illegals.
The trades are in pretty poor shape...which isn't to say they aren't a viable option...
One year in the dorms I made up an authentic looking fake departmental memo, complete with file path line at the bottom, that said that the Dorm showers would be out of service for a week while they were replaced by coin-op ones (at $.25/5 minutes). We printed em up and spread em around. Later that day there was much rumbling in the cafeteria. The best was my roommate, Mr. Clean, three drunken showers a day, who let out a yell of "Can you believe this!?!" He was even starting to calculate how much it would cost him...
There's just about everything you'd want from a Star Trek episode but the Captain getting it on with a green-skinned vixen down on the planet. Darnit, I wanna see some alien nookie.
Surely we can all agree military service is harder than going to college
I beg to differ, having done both. Joining the U.S. military is the easiest thing on earth, as long as you meet the physical and mental requirements. Boot camp beats the crap out of you but it's over soon enough. After that your life is handed to you on a platter. It might not be the life you prefer but all the major decisions are made for you.
Military training is somewhat valuable. It's mostly just a start, and a real job in the real world is going to require further school.
Incidently, at least half of the new people reporting to my unit these days are college drop-outs.
After attempting to cool my Athlon puter with mineral oil (I used baby oil and the whole thing smelled nice but didn't get cool nuff) I had all kinds of terrible problems due to a thin film inside all the connectors on the mobo. I couldn't for the life of me get them all cleaned by hand so as a last resort popped out the cmos battery and ran the sucker through the dishwasher with a non-abrasive detergent. Once I got 'er all dry everything ran great!!
as to cruft in my keyboard, I have a nice old clicket-y IBM with the pop-off key covers (missing the darn left ctrl keycap) and one 'o em $200 3M vacuum cleaners with the fancy schmancy filters does it just fine. *
I hear ya man, spent Xmas eve doing backups on the Morg's server and keeping the peace. No drills thank goodness on holiday routine.
I betcha your rotation ain't 1in4 though.
look me up in the global.
ET3 Isaac Gorton
(Just put in my package for ET2)
That's nothing...I was yahoo chatting with a friend regarding the odd fact that all AOL traffic seems to route through Arlington, VA, despite my dialing in from Seattle and San Francisco...when I joked that the CIA must be in bed with AOL and monitoring my connection, I was immediately booted offline. Kinda spooky.
Well, I'm two years into the Coast Guard so I can cover that;
First, I've had almost a year of electronics training that can be transfered to college credit fairly easy. I know the Navy has longer schools (we go to some of them for some of our equipment that we get from them) but theirs are very focused. Coast Guard ETs are given a broad little-bit-of everything because that's what our support task is like. We are much thinner on resources than the other services and so we must make them stretch.
Notice that I am an Electronics Technician. I've got plenty of background in computers and I wanted to stay away from that whole psyched up shebang...though I'll be reprogramming some RADAR Eeproms via a custom serial interface when I get back from leave next week...
In any service it helps a lot to know what you want to do before you get in. Don't rely on recruiters or their aptitude tests. If possible talk to folks who've been in and are doing the job you are interested in.
The Coast Guard's IT program is a sad joke, I don't even want to go there. I pity the fools who are going to be going to the new IT school they're brewing up...(NT 4.0 basics and some exchange hacks that nobody knows how to support and you're on your way have fun. You're an "IT".)
I'll stick to my hardware thank you, as somebody's sig pointed out, if it ain't on fire, it's a software problem. But even then, almost half my job is spent with the human support side. I spend more time training folks (and fixing their mistakes) than I do ripping open racks.
Seeing as you'll have your degree, you'll be pushed into being an Officer (three times the pay for a third the work ain't bad) which is mostly paperwork and babysitting. Unless you get on one of the engineering staffs I dunno what kinda technical stuff you would be doing.
And another thing: Those of us lucky enough to be on whitehulls (Real Ships) spend at least half the year at sea. Don't listen to some sandpeep or squid who tells you otherwise.
good luck!
Well, over a hundred posts and nobody has said this;
How is such a super duper secure network going to be used? Is there going to be a secret special terminal at your local federal building where the agents email their counterpart in the next state?
I work daily with military computer systems and it is hard enough just keeping the spam and porn and cnn streaming video off our networks. The worst offenders are often those in charge and those who should know better, those whose job it is to enforce security. As long as we have people using the system it will be inherently insecure. Maybe Dubya will be calling up about 2.8 million more security people to stand in every government office and look over shoulders.
Those people in the government who have a need to know secret things already have secure (physically) means to do so. This new GOVNET is a PR scam that has no purpose other than to stir up the public even more.
(Though I think the public are more excited about the 0% interest on new cars and the cheap gasoline than they are about not seeing photos of the 5000 people recently murdered.)
*sigh* My sig is becoming more and more true...
if anyone didn't noticed, this is a bit of a joke. the Compaq LTE Lite 4/33C is a 33mhz 486 laptop with 4mb of ram and an 8.5" screen. it is sized like a "thin & lite". There's one on Ebay right now for about $10.
Kudos to strredwolf for booting Slack on that lil hummer...
*
"...and the fact that the word "replica" is written on your gun and the word "Desert Eagle.50" is written on mine, would percipitate your balls into shrinking......
"
Nines are fine if you live in the 'hood or are participating in a joint NATO exercise but for good 'ol ease of use and stopping power nothin beats a.357 Magnum S&W.
At first I was going to go see this, because I've enjoyed some of Li's earlier work (Though not as much as Jackie Chan's;-) and I enjoy a good bit of kicking and punching. But after seeing the preview in the theatre (Or should I say spoiler...as that's what they all are these days...) I decided that this will be one to let the roommate buy when it comes out on DVD in a month or two.
Instead, go see Iron Monkey! It's absolutely wonderful Kung Fu and a great story. (IANAMA)
...As long as my cd-rs don't delaminate or oxidize.
I started out with zipslack because it was the only way i could try out this new Linux thing without destroying my happy little compaq term-paper writing machine. Of course I discovered FIPS a few months later. (College kids living on air and sunshine don't have the privilage of buying a new hd just to learn how to fsck.)
Since then I've tried several other distros but none gave me the flexibility of Slack. Even the latest greatest Mandrake sucks the bilges when it comes to compiling a new kernel and configuring oddball hardware. With slack all the config files are easy to find and in plain english.
And besides, this is just a message posting of one guy saying he's too busy to maintain one nifty program. bring on the tarballs!
Ah, you've found what us shipboard folks lovingly call the CHEESE-WIZ. Darn thing's spozda protect us from incoming missiles and whatnot, knock on wood it'll do the job. Not only is it big and heavy, it takes up a fair amount of deck space that could be used for picnic tables and a bar-b-q.
Well, I just got back from seeing it 5 minutes ago and while it isn't your typical hollywood shoot em up cliche flick it is pretty mindless...just in a different way. You'll know what I mean when you see it. Not a terribly inspirational or even thought-provoking film, but it stands out from the drivel nonetheless.
I'm an Electronics Technician in the Coast Guard, I've been in a year and a half and I'll be an E-5 easily within a year. For those of you not hip with the lingo, that's where the money starts to get comfortable & one starts to get all kinds of extra benefits. (Of course most of the programs are set up to benefit married folks...sigh)
I had a year of College, but after they dropped my grants in exchange for more loans & I found my education wasn't much better than what I was getting in High School, I quit, went and scrubbed toilets, painted houses, and had some fun. But paying off the debt I'd already accumulated just didn't seem very easy, & with negative funds I had no way (not even a car) to get myself to the big city where all the real money is.
So I went to the Coast Guard recruiter, told him what I wanted to be, and got myself a guaranteed ET school with a sign-on bonus. Learned a bunch of new things at boot camp that have absolutely nothing to do with the real Coast Guard but were challenging enough at the time.;-)
School was pretty challenging, then I had more schools in my specialty, RADARs, now I'm on my Cutter (the price I payed for school directly from boot-camp was a guaranteed sea billet) where I'm becoming the assistant (cough) network administrator (We run about 50 NT workstations & a couple servers, local networking & internet access for the crew). They'll be sending me to the school in a month or so. There's also a few systems on board that run UNIX or variants thereof, including one of my radars.
I'm enjoying it, I've already seen Mexico & Guatemala. I do all kinds of electronics work but also all kinds of other technical and non-technical things on board ship. If I'm tired of staring at a computer I step out and redo some weatherproofing on an antenna or go help the deckies paint. When the paperwork piles up I can go out at night and look at the most awesome sky on earth. When my shipmates get annoying, I go look at the dolphins & whales & turtles. It's pretty cool, despite the hardship of being away from civilization & my car & a high speed internet connection.
Yeah I don't get payed much now, but I'm getting payed more than I would at college. I'll have my associates degree polished off in a couple months using distance learning. Every contractor we deal with on land asks when we're getting out cuz they want to hire us, so prospects can't be that bad, and I'm stationed here just 20 minutes from silicon valley, home of the high-paying 6 months then dead startup job.
If you'd like to know more about the Coast Guard email me (it's obfuscated duh). The recruiters are usually smart but not in the know. ETs are in high demand now, because everyone gets out after their first enlistment for the real world...
Something good about China on slashdot... not that the guys on top have done anything wrong, quite the contrary;-) But the recent story that mentioned China and Linux brought a swarm of very negative anti-chinese comments. Get a clue people. Westerners (particularly us United Statesens) could learn a lot from the rest of the world. Get over the whole Communist / Government / Propoganda thing and learn about the people!!! Sheesh. I am disgusted sometimes by what I read on/. but, there's enough good stuff here and some honest, cool opinions, so I keep coming back, every day. This here article just made my day. Cool! A glimpse of China.
Slashdot Mirror
Construction is a dead end in most parts of the country as well. The high cost of liability insurance and such means that only large firms are surviving, and at least over here on the West coast, just about all of them hire piles of semi-skilled Mexican migrants/illegals.
The trades are in pretty poor shape...which isn't to say they aren't a viable option...
One year in the dorms I made up an authentic looking fake departmental memo, complete with file path line at the bottom, that said that the Dorm showers would be out of service for a week while they were replaced by coin-op ones (at $.25/5 minutes). We printed em up and spread em around. Later that day there was much rumbling in the cafeteria. The best was my roommate, Mr. Clean, three drunken showers a day, who let out a yell of "Can you believe this!?!" He was even starting to calculate how much it would cost him...
Now, Just 'old on a second, while I stick my THUMB up 'is BUMMHOLE!
There's just about everything you'd want from a Star Trek episode but the Captain getting it on with a green-skinned vixen down on the planet. Darnit, I wanna see some alien nookie.
Surely we can all agree military service is harder than going to college
I beg to differ, having done both. Joining the U.S. military is the easiest thing on earth, as long as you meet the physical and mental requirements. Boot camp beats the crap out of you but it's over soon enough. After that your life is handed to you on a platter. It might not be the life you prefer but all the major decisions are made for you.
Military training is somewhat valuable. It's mostly just a start, and a real job in the real world is going to require further school.
Incidently, at least half of the new people reporting to my unit these days are college drop-outs.
And if it's been ages since someone quit and that excuse don't work anymore, blame it on the NEW GUY!
After attempting to cool my Athlon puter with mineral oil (I used baby oil and the whole thing smelled nice but didn't get cool nuff) I had all kinds of terrible problems due to a thin film inside all the connectors on the mobo. I couldn't for the life of me get them all cleaned by hand so as a last resort popped out the cmos battery and ran the sucker through the dishwasher with a non-abrasive detergent. Once I got 'er all dry everything ran great!!
as to cruft in my keyboard, I have a nice old clicket-y IBM with the pop-off key covers (missing the darn left ctrl keycap) and one 'o em $200 3M vacuum cleaners with the fancy schmancy filters does it just fine.
*
I hear ya man, spent Xmas eve doing backups on the Morg's server and keeping the peace. No drills thank goodness on holiday routine.
I betcha your rotation ain't 1in4 though.
look me up in the global.
ET3 Isaac Gorton
(Just put in my package for ET2)
That's nothing...I was yahoo chatting with a friend regarding the odd fact that all AOL traffic seems to route through Arlington, VA, despite my dialing in from Seattle and San Francisco...when I joked that the CIA must be in bed with AOL and monitoring my connection, I was immediately booted offline. Kinda spooky.
I'd call this buying a web server rather than building one...
Well, I'm two years into the Coast Guard so I can cover that;
First, I've had almost a year of electronics training that can be transfered to college credit fairly easy. I know the Navy has longer schools (we go to some of them for some of our equipment that we get from them) but theirs are very focused. Coast Guard ETs are given a broad little-bit-of everything because that's what our support task is like. We are much thinner on resources than the other services and so we must make them stretch.
Notice that I am an Electronics Technician. I've got plenty of background in computers and I wanted to stay away from that whole psyched up shebang...though I'll be reprogramming some RADAR Eeproms via a custom serial interface when I get back from leave next week...
In any service it helps a lot to know what you want to do before you get in. Don't rely on recruiters or their aptitude tests. If possible talk to folks who've been in and are doing the job you are interested in.
The Coast Guard's IT program is a sad joke, I don't even want to go there. I pity the fools who are going to be going to the new IT school they're brewing up...(NT 4.0 basics and some exchange hacks that nobody knows how to support and you're on your way have fun. You're an "IT".)
I'll stick to my hardware thank you, as somebody's sig pointed out, if it ain't on fire, it's a software problem. But even then, almost half my job is spent with the human support side. I spend more time training folks (and fixing their mistakes) than I do ripping open racks.
Seeing as you'll have your degree, you'll be pushed into being an Officer (three times the pay for a third the work ain't bad) which is mostly paperwork and babysitting. Unless you get on one of the engineering staffs I dunno what kinda technical stuff you would be doing.
And another thing: Those of us lucky enough to be on whitehulls (Real Ships) spend at least half the year at sea. Don't listen to some sandpeep or squid who tells you otherwise.
good luck!
Well, over a hundred posts and nobody has said this;
How is such a super duper secure network going to be used? Is there going to be a secret special terminal at your local federal building where the agents email their counterpart in the next state?
I work daily with military computer systems and it is hard enough just keeping the spam and porn and cnn streaming video off our networks. The worst offenders are often those in charge and those who should know better, those whose job it is to enforce security. As long as we have people using the system it will be inherently insecure. Maybe Dubya will be calling up about 2.8 million more security people to stand in every government office and look over shoulders.
Those people in the government who have a need to know secret things already have secure (physically) means to do so. This new GOVNET is a PR scam that has no purpose other than to stir up the public even more.
(Though I think the public are more excited about the 0% interest on new cars and the cheap gasoline than they are about not seeing photos of the 5000 people recently murdered.)
*sigh* My sig is becoming more and more true...
if anyone didn't noticed, this is a bit of a joke. the Compaq LTE Lite 4/33C is a 33mhz 486 laptop with 4mb of ram and an 8.5" screen. it is sized like a "thin & lite". There's one on Ebay right now for about $10.
Kudos to strredwolf for booting Slack on that lil hummer...
*
You compiling on a 386 it takes you that long? ;-)
*
"...and the fact that the word "replica" is written on your gun and the word "Desert Eagle .50" is written on mine, would percipitate your balls into shrinking......
"
The One plotline just kinda reminds me of the Highlander stories...
Nines are fine if you live in the 'hood or are participating in a joint NATO exercise but for good 'ol ease of use and stopping power nothin beats a .357 Magnum S&W.
At first I was going to go see this, because I've enjoyed some of Li's earlier work (Though not as much as Jackie Chan's ;-) and I enjoy a good bit of kicking and punching. But after seeing the preview in the theatre (Or should I say spoiler...as that's what they all are these days...) I decided that this will be one to let the roommate buy when it comes out on DVD in a month or two.
Instead, go see Iron Monkey! It's absolutely wonderful Kung Fu and a great story. (IANAMA)
...As long as my cd-rs don't delaminate or oxidize.
I started out with zipslack because it was the only way i could try out this new Linux thing without destroying my happy little compaq term-paper writing machine. Of course I discovered FIPS a few months later. (College kids living on air and sunshine don't have the privilage of buying a new hd just to learn how to fsck.)
Since then I've tried several other distros but none gave me the flexibility of Slack. Even the latest greatest Mandrake sucks the bilges when it comes to compiling a new kernel and configuring oddball hardware. With slack all the config files are easy to find and in plain english.
And besides, this is just a message posting of one guy saying he's too busy to maintain one nifty program. bring on the tarballs!
Ah, you've found what us shipboard folks lovingly call the CHEESE-WIZ. Darn thing's spozda protect us from incoming missiles and whatnot, knock on wood it'll do the job. Not only is it big and heavy, it takes up a fair amount of deck space that could be used for picnic tables and a bar-b-q.
...stuck at the pier cuz of budget cutbacks...
Well, I just got back from seeing it 5 minutes ago and while it isn't your typical hollywood shoot em up cliche flick it is pretty mindless...just in a different way. You'll know what I mean when you see it. Not a terribly inspirational or even thought-provoking film, but it stands out from the drivel nonetheless.
I'm an Electronics Technician in the Coast Guard, I've been in a year and a half and I'll be an E-5 easily within a year. For those of you not hip with the lingo, that's where the money starts to get comfortable & one starts to get all kinds of extra benefits. (Of course most of the programs are set up to benefit married folks...sigh)
;-)
I had a year of College, but after they dropped my grants in exchange for more loans & I found my education wasn't much better than what I was getting in High School, I quit, went and scrubbed toilets, painted houses, and had some fun. But paying off the debt I'd already accumulated just didn't seem very easy, & with negative funds I had no way (not even a car) to get myself to the big city where all the real money is.
So I went to the Coast Guard recruiter, told him what I wanted to be, and got myself a guaranteed ET school with a sign-on bonus. Learned a bunch of new things at boot camp that have absolutely nothing to do with the real Coast Guard but were challenging enough at the time.
School was pretty challenging, then I had more schools in my specialty, RADARs, now I'm on my Cutter (the price I payed for school directly from boot-camp was a guaranteed sea billet) where I'm becoming the assistant (cough) network administrator (We run about 50 NT workstations & a couple servers, local networking & internet access for the crew). They'll be sending me to the school in a month or so. There's also a few systems on board that run UNIX or variants thereof, including one of my radars.
I'm enjoying it, I've already seen Mexico & Guatemala. I do all kinds of electronics work but also all kinds of other technical and non-technical things on board ship. If I'm tired of staring at a computer I step out and redo some weatherproofing on an antenna or go help the deckies paint. When the paperwork piles up I can go out at night and look at the most awesome sky on earth. When my shipmates get annoying, I go look at the dolphins & whales & turtles. It's pretty cool, despite the hardship of being away from civilization & my car & a high speed internet connection.
Yeah I don't get payed much now, but I'm getting payed more than I would at college. I'll have my associates degree polished off in a couple months using distance learning. Every contractor we deal with on land asks when we're getting out cuz they want to hire us, so prospects can't be that bad, and I'm stationed here just 20 minutes from silicon valley, home of the high-paying 6 months then dead startup job.
If you'd like to know more about the Coast Guard email me (it's obfuscated duh). The recruiters are usually smart but not in the know. ETs are in high demand now, because everyone gets out after their first enlistment for the real world...
i'm 19...for another few months
i'd ruin my whole life and career and be in geo. lucas' movie for a chance to be in the same room with queen amidala. mmmmmm.
the coast guard has my ass on monday. woohoo.
oh shoo /.
disregard this
i'm just fiddling with
;-)
Something good about China on slashdot... ;-) /. but, there's enough good stuff here and some honest, cool opinions, so I keep coming back, every day. This here article just made my day. Cool! A glimpse of China.
not that the guys on top have done anything wrong, quite the contrary
But the recent story that mentioned China and Linux brought a swarm of very negative anti-chinese comments. Get a clue people. Westerners (particularly us United Statesens) could learn a lot from the rest of the world. Get over the whole Communist / Government / Propoganda thing and learn about the people!!!
Sheesh.
I am disgusted sometimes by what I read on
okay. nuff ranting.