Home schooling is a very unfortunate double edge sword. Despite what most people think, the most important part of highschool has nothing to do with academics and drugs. If you have a desire to learn, even a terrible public school should still provide you with a library, a free internet connection, and at least one or two teachers who actually care. Anyone who sits through highschool expecting their education to be handed to them deserves to fail out of college and work minimum wage the rest of their lives. Anyone who does drugs deserves to be taken out in the street and publicly beaten by their friends and family for being stupid. (yes, that includes smoking and excessive alcohol use...it destroys your body and makes everyone around you uncomfortable)
The real value you take away from public school is learning how to interract with a variety of people. In college, the homeschooled folks usually stood out like a sore thumb and we did our best to get them out of their dorms and into society so they could learn how to talk to people. And yes, trying to get laid is a big part of this as trying to communicate with the opposite sex has, is, and always will be the biggest mystery known to mankind. College is no different when it comes to what you really take away. Often the particular degree you get isn't even worth the paper it's printed on. For college, what you've really accomplished is surviving 4 or 5 years working for a variety of different and demanding bosses and managing to please enough of them to pass their classes.
It all comes back to the key thing harped on by most of the posts in this thread, the interview. How capable are you of communicating to another individual what you know. Unless you are experienced in guaging what the interviewer's education level is, you could walk out of an interview feeling great, and then never understand why they didn't hire you. This is especially important if you are looking for a tech management job. You can know everything under the sun, but if you come off as an arrogant know-it-all, no one's going to hire you because they know no one will want to work for you.
For a tech, knowing how to interrect with people is the difference between beeing in the trenches and bitching about the management, or actually being the management. Yeah, you may spend less time hacking at the system, but you actually get to make the decisions and you also get paid a hell of a lot more.
Disclaimer: I have met quite a few homeschooled people, some of which have done just fine. A majority of them did have trouble being team players during the first part of college, but most got over it and learned. This is just the observations of an IT Manager who has a college degree in General Engineering and not one single certification. My success came from my ability to talk to people and convey to them that I also know a great deal about Computer Programming, Operating Systems and Network Management.
Actually, I keep a box of blank floppies right next to my dev machine for just such reasons. Because I do dev on both windows and linux and have been too cheap to buy a CD burner, OS boot disks are key.
For those who are still doubting their worth, I once tried tripple booting Win98SE, RH5.2, and BEOS 4.3...everything went great for the first day, but when I woke up the next morning my Master Boot Record was hammered beyond repair. I didn't know about SuperRescue back then (did it even exist?) so I ended up having to boot from a DOS 6.1 install disk and do a format/MBR and work from there. I've never had a repeat of losing the MBR, but I've also never been without the boot disks just in case.
BTW, MOD the parent post up as informative! I'll shamefully admit I had never even heard of SuperRescue until I read his post. I could have used it back then.
So far it seems that everyone has failed to actually read what he wrote. It's not like he hopped on freshmeat and searched for "torpedo guidance system" and actually found something to work with. His quandry is most likely whether or not using open source tools for his project requires his project to be open source. This is an easy answer as you can generate all the code you want using open source tools and then release it under any license that makes you happy. The Marine Corps Warehouse Management System is powered by Red Hat 6.0 and compiled using gcc. While the number of $500 toilet seats we have in warehouse 5 is not really a matter of National Security, it still may be a peice of information that enemies could develop intelligence with, so the system specifications and code remain closed source. We are not violating the GPL because our system is not based on GPL'd code.
Although, to keep everyone happy, you may have to name your project GNU/Submarine.
My shop develops web based database software for the Marine Corps in the Okinawa, Japan region. Every application we support is based on a core set of libraries to handle all the ugly parts of talking through ODBC and the mundane parts of HTML Tags.
Although I've been coding for almost 16 years now, I've never been involved as a project manager for something this big. (our main app is rapidly approaching 100,000 lines) We have found through trial and error that code freeze/documentation periods are essential to ensure that we are all still using the same vesrions of the core libraries. This is especially critical for web page design as each page can almost be considered an object with a specific interface. If you change the interface on a page, you just broke every page that connects to that page. I'm sure the various components of KDE are no different.
KDE dev team, don't shoot the messenger! I think this is a fantastic opportunity for you to have your development practices analyzed by the slashdot community. I don't even think you could hire a consulting firm this honest and experienced.
I'm currently stationed in Okinawa and all my Japanese friends are currently frustrated by the ammount of spam they receive.
Also, not sure if you have seen the new Sprint PCS phone from Sanyo, but it is getting close to the tech out here and I beleive will allow emails of any size to come through.
I know I've sent some sizeable ones (500 - 700 characters to provide directions) to my friends and they received them just fine. The also can receive pics in emails.
The flip side of this is the unbeleivable convenience it is to get written driving directions sent to you. Not to mention when the US finally catches up to Japan and releases $200 phones that also have a digital camera in them.
It was the "Great Pain" part that killed it. I too suffered through a few classes on that language and it simply boiled down to supply vs demand. The civilian sector saw no reason to learn Ada since other languages could accomplish the same functionality. As the era of Reaganomics went away and the infinite supply of government money for hiring contractors died, the contractors were forced to cater to customers other than DOD to stay alive. Everyone else was looking for C/C++ or Java (mid 90's) and so that's where the talent and training went. The DOD finally had to accept the fact that there weren't enough Ada supporting contractors left to support the language as a standard, so they instead moved to the "Commercial Off The Shelf" COTS line of thinking. Fortunately the contracting industry had basically settled on C/C++ as the language of choice, so we didn't have the myriad of languages you did back in the 80's.
I think a few DOD offices still try to push for Ada, but most have accepted defeat. All the new systems coming online in the USMC logistics community are now written in ANSI C.
I run a software development section for the Marine Corps and we use two languages that are very different.
C is used for all our web based stuff to ensure that it is platform independant. We could have used C++, but most of our programmers are folks who have a limitted background with computers so we keep it simple. Java was also rejected for reasons of simplicity as well as the sheer number of pages I've seen crap out do to poorly written scripts.
VB is used in conjuction with MS Access when we need a quick and dirty DB for someone to do some custom queries on. Again, choice of language is mainly due to simplicity as well as the DOD's preference for MS on the desktop.
While these two languages really don't look that different just looking at the code itself. The environment and process of writing in them is completely different. We have actually found it better to train our folks in VB first because once they learn C, they usually have an aversion to going back to VB's limitations despite its simplicity.
Other languages such as Perl, php, and C# were considered, but rejected to stay inline with the majority of software developed for DOD.
I would say that around 30% of the Marine Corps Officer Corps could identify with this. Job choice for Officers has nothing to do with your past education and experience. I graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in Engineering and also had 14 years of computer programming experience (started at 11) as well as a few industry certs in network admin.
The way jobs are picked is done as follows:
* Every one in your class at the Basic Officer Course lists their job preferences from 1 to 25 out of the 25 available fields.
* The class is then divided into thirds based on class standing.
* The number one person of each third gets their first available choice, then the number two person and so on down the line. So if you were the bottom of the top third, you could potentially be screwed unless no one above you wanted your first choice.
* Then all the different section heads sit down in a room and start shifting a few people around. (i.e. one person may have gotten their 5th choice and another their 10th. If person 1's 5th choice happened to be person 2's 2nd choice and the section heads feel strongly enough about person 2, they may give person 1 his 6th choice since once you're beyond the top 3 it usually doesn't matter anyways.)
My section head knew of my skills and my first choice was Communications and Information Technology. I ended up with my 4th choice which was Supply Management. On the bright side though, as soon as I got to my first command, they put me in charge of a computer programming section (that develops supply management software) and I've been happily coding web based apps ever since.
To all those stationed overseas...
on
Merry Christmas
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Merry christmas from Okinawa! Got some practical gifts from the woman and burnt a $20 phone card talking to her for 2 hours which was good enough for me. All my Okinawan friends had to work today, but they promise new years will make up for it.
To all my fellow Marines, Airmen, Soldiers and Sailors who also spent christmas with thier loved ones via phone or internet:
Semper Fidelis, Merry Christmas, and thanks for helping keep the world a safer place!
Re:Interesting...
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The only problem with custom hardware is a limmited supply channel. I am a supply officer in the Marine Corps and we are currently suffering under our contract with Compaq. Their terms prevent us from performing any upgrades and the only parts we can use are Compaq's custom stuff. The end result are computers that are down for weeks as we wait for Compaq parts to arrive and then have to schedule one of their reps to come install them.
Needless to say, unless Compaq drastically changes their business practices, they will never see another contract from the US Military. We can't exactly stop training in the middle of Thailand to mail order overpriced NIC's and RAM when any other vendor would allow us to use parts we could purchase in country with pocket change.
Dell, on the other hand, has been wonderful and will continue to be my first choice on flexibility and customer service.
Slashdot Mirror
Home schooling is a very unfortunate double edge sword. Despite what most people think, the most important part of highschool has nothing to do with academics and drugs. If you have a desire to learn, even a terrible public school should still provide you with a library, a free internet connection, and at least one or two teachers who actually care. Anyone who sits through highschool expecting their education to be handed to them deserves to fail out of college and work minimum wage the rest of their lives. Anyone who does drugs deserves to be taken out in the street and publicly beaten by their friends and family for being stupid. (yes, that includes smoking and excessive alcohol use...it destroys your body and makes everyone around you uncomfortable)
The real value you take away from public school is learning how to interract with a variety of people. In college, the homeschooled folks usually stood out like a sore thumb and we did our best to get them out of their dorms and into society so they could learn how to talk to people. And yes, trying to get laid is a big part of this as trying to communicate with the opposite sex has, is, and always will be the biggest mystery known to mankind. College is no different when it comes to what you really take away. Often the particular degree you get isn't even worth the paper it's printed on. For college, what you've really accomplished is surviving 4 or 5 years working for a variety of different and demanding bosses and managing to please enough of them to pass their classes.
It all comes back to the key thing harped on by most of the posts in this thread, the interview. How capable are you of communicating to another individual what you know. Unless you are experienced in guaging what the interviewer's education level is, you could walk out of an interview feeling great, and then never understand why they didn't hire you. This is especially important if you are looking for a tech management job. You can know everything under the sun, but if you come off as an arrogant know-it-all, no one's going to hire you because they know no one will want to work for you.
For a tech, knowing how to interrect with people is the difference between beeing in the trenches and bitching about the management, or actually being the management. Yeah, you may spend less time hacking at the system, but you actually get to make the decisions and you also get paid a hell of a lot more.
Disclaimer: I have met quite a few homeschooled people, some of which have done just fine. A majority of them did have trouble being team players during the first part of college, but most got over it and learned. This is just the observations of an IT Manager who has a college degree in General Engineering and not one single certification. My success came from my ability to talk to people and convey to them that I also know a great deal about Computer Programming, Operating Systems and Network Management.
Actually, I keep a box of blank floppies right next to my dev machine for just such reasons. Because I do dev on both windows and linux and have been too cheap to buy a CD burner, OS boot disks are key.
/MBR and work from there. I've never had a repeat of losing the MBR, but I've also never been without the boot disks just in case.
For those who are still doubting their worth, I once tried tripple booting Win98SE, RH5.2, and BEOS 4.3...everything went great for the first day, but when I woke up the next morning my Master Boot Record was hammered beyond repair. I didn't know about SuperRescue back then (did it even exist?) so I ended up having to boot from a DOS 6.1 install disk and do a format
BTW, MOD the parent post up as informative! I'll shamefully admit I had never even heard of SuperRescue until I read his post. I could have used it back then.
So far it seems that everyone has failed to actually read what he wrote. It's not like he hopped on freshmeat and searched for "torpedo guidance system" and actually found something to work with. His quandry is most likely whether or not using open source tools for his project requires his project to be open source. This is an easy answer as you can generate all the code you want using open source tools and then release it under any license that makes you happy. The Marine Corps Warehouse Management System is powered by Red Hat 6.0 and compiled using gcc. While the number of $500 toilet seats we have in warehouse 5 is not really a matter of National Security, it still may be a peice of information that enemies could develop intelligence with, so the system specifications and code remain closed source. We are not violating the GPL because our system is not based on GPL'd code.
Although, to keep everyone happy, you may have to name your project GNU/Submarine.
My shop develops web based database software for the Marine Corps in the Okinawa, Japan region. Every application we support is based on a core set of libraries to handle all the ugly parts of talking through ODBC and the mundane parts of HTML Tags.
Although I've been coding for almost 16 years now, I've never been involved as a project manager for something this big. (our main app is rapidly approaching 100,000 lines) We have found through trial and error that code freeze/documentation periods are essential to ensure that we are all still using the same vesrions of the core libraries. This is especially critical for web page design as each page can almost be considered an object with a specific interface. If you change the interface on a page, you just broke every page that connects to that page. I'm sure the various components of KDE are no different.
KDE dev team, don't shoot the messenger! I think this is a fantastic opportunity for you to have your development practices analyzed by the slashdot community. I don't even think you could hire a consulting firm this honest and experienced.
I'm currently stationed in Okinawa and all my Japanese friends are currently frustrated by the ammount of spam they receive.
Also, not sure if you have seen the new Sprint PCS phone from Sanyo, but it is getting close to the tech out here and I beleive will allow emails of any size to come through.
I know I've sent some sizeable ones (500 - 700 characters to provide directions) to my friends and they received them just fine. The also can receive pics in emails.
The flip side of this is the unbeleivable convenience it is to get written driving directions sent to you. Not to mention when the US finally catches up to Japan and releases $200 phones that also have a digital camera in them.
my two cents...
It was the "Great Pain" part that killed it. I too suffered through a few classes on that language and it simply boiled down to supply vs demand. The civilian sector saw no reason to learn Ada since other languages could accomplish the same functionality. As the era of Reaganomics went away and the infinite supply of government money for hiring contractors died, the contractors were forced to cater to customers other than DOD to stay alive. Everyone else was looking for C/C++ or Java (mid 90's) and so that's where the talent and training went. The DOD finally had to accept the fact that there weren't enough Ada supporting contractors left to support the language as a standard, so they instead moved to the "Commercial Off The Shelf" COTS line of thinking. Fortunately the contracting industry had basically settled on C/C++ as the language of choice, so we didn't have the myriad of languages you did back in the 80's.
I think a few DOD offices still try to push for Ada, but most have accepted defeat. All the new systems coming online in the USMC logistics community are now written in ANSI C.
I run a software development section for the Marine Corps and we use two languages that are very different.
C is used for all our web based stuff to ensure that it is platform independant. We could have used C++, but most of our programmers are folks who have a limitted background with computers so we keep it simple. Java was also rejected for reasons of simplicity as well as the sheer number of pages I've seen crap out do to poorly written scripts.
VB is used in conjuction with MS Access when we need a quick and dirty DB for someone to do some custom queries on. Again, choice of language is mainly due to simplicity as well as the DOD's preference for MS on the desktop.
While these two languages really don't look that different just looking at the code itself. The environment and process of writing in them is completely different. We have actually found it better to train our folks in VB first because once they learn C, they usually have an aversion to going back to VB's limitations despite its simplicity.
Other languages such as Perl, php, and C# were considered, but rejected to stay inline with the majority of software developed for DOD.
Hope this was informative.
I would say that around 30% of the Marine Corps Officer Corps could identify with this. Job choice for Officers has nothing to do with your past education and experience. I graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in Engineering and also had 14 years of computer programming experience (started at 11) as well as a few industry certs in network admin.
The way jobs are picked is done as follows:
* Every one in your class at the Basic Officer Course lists their job preferences from 1 to 25 out of the 25 available fields.
* The class is then divided into thirds based on class standing.
* The number one person of each third gets their first available choice, then the number two person and so on down the line. So if you were the bottom of the top third, you could potentially be screwed unless no one above you wanted your first choice.
* Then all the different section heads sit down in a room and start shifting a few people around. (i.e. one person may have gotten their 5th choice and another their 10th. If person 1's 5th choice happened to be person 2's 2nd choice and the section heads feel strongly enough about person 2, they may give person 1 his 6th choice since once you're beyond the top 3 it usually doesn't matter anyways.)
My section head knew of my skills and my first choice was Communications and Information Technology. I ended up with my 4th choice which was Supply Management. On the bright side though, as soon as I got to my first command, they put me in charge of a computer programming section (that develops supply management software) and I've been happily coding web based apps ever since.
Merry christmas from Okinawa! Got some practical gifts from the woman and burnt a $20 phone card talking to her for 2 hours which was good enough for me. All my Okinawan friends had to work today, but they promise new years will make up for it.
To all my fellow Marines, Airmen, Soldiers and Sailors who also spent christmas with thier loved ones via phone or internet:
Semper Fidelis, Merry Christmas, and thanks for helping keep the world a safer place!
The only problem with custom hardware is a limmited supply channel. I am a supply officer in the Marine Corps and we are currently suffering under our contract with Compaq. Their terms prevent us from performing any upgrades and the only parts we can use are Compaq's custom stuff. The end result are computers that are down for weeks as we wait for Compaq parts to arrive and then have to schedule one of their reps to come install them.
Needless to say, unless Compaq drastically changes their business practices, they will never see another contract from the US Military. We can't exactly stop training in the middle of Thailand to mail order overpriced NIC's and RAM when any other vendor would allow us to use parts we could purchase in country with pocket change.
Dell, on the other hand, has been wonderful and will continue to be my first choice on flexibility and customer service.