get leaps and bounds over my fellow colleagues with only a B.S.
Really? What makes you think that is so? I've talked to 11 people in the higher echelons of technical management around my area, and the concensus was this: An M.S. in C.S. is utterly worthless.
Their reason was simple, all the jobs out there today require at least a small amount of experiance. Now, say a job requires X years of experiance with a M.S., that same job will also include a line such as "X+2 years with an B.S.". It is very rare for a job to REQUIRE a M.S.
Therefore, the two (or more) years you spent in school paying money to learn worthless textbook garbage, could be spent making money in your field.
Of course, this changes drastically when it comes to Ph.D.'s. There are plenty of positions where a PhD is either required or strongly preferred.
Did you find something that dictates this is not the case ?
I'm going back to graduate school soon, to take advantage of a tuition benefit. However, from what I hear, a MBA is one of the more valuable degrees to have, short of a PhD (that'll take WAY too long part time).
Should I be denied a job because I was able to fulfill my other responsibilities while still achieving my degree objectives?
Interesting point, considering your sig:
why are Communist in the US? With Cuba so close, it's like going to KFC when you want a Big Mac!
I'm just sayin'....
Now, a couple of points:
1) I've been living with my wife for four years in various apartments. We also are the guardians of her younger (teenaged) sister. So no, I don't just have myself to support -- I have a family too.
2) I wish I had a mortgage. Where I live, the mortgage on a 3 bedroom home is almost 2/3 of the rent on a 2 bedroom apartment. (I'm looking to buy ASAP, renting is awful)
3) I worked between 20-40 hours a week while in school (nope, haven't had a social life since HS). However, I supplemented my earned income with student loans to help pay living expenses (just as most students do to pay for their dorm rooms). Hence, Sallie Mae owns my soul.
No one said it was easy or for anyone, the point is that it CAN BE and IS done all the time. Of course, your situation might dictate that it wouldn't work for you. There are always exceptions.
I just felt like I needed to point out that the assumpts you made about me, because of my age, were all wrong. Its okay though, I get that all the time.
I'm not saying that doing the student loan thing is a wise decision or not. My point is simply that the money is there, albeit with a 6% APR string attached.
Let's start with my favorite argument of all time:
I do not have a rich mommy and daddy to pay for my school
Okay, see that's a complete load of crap. I get that all the time from the people I know that drop out half a semester into a year at a real school, because they can't handle it.
I'm 22 years old. I graduated last summer from the University of Pittsburgh, with a BA and BS (Classics, Computer Science, and Mathematics). While not IV leauge, Pitt certainly is a large, physical, accredited, research institution, that charges roughly $10k/year.
Now, how did I pay for that (4 years + 3 inbetween summer terms too)? Well, I'm the son of a bartender (mother) and a bricklayer (father). They divorced when I was three. I grew up in a 2 bedroom apartment that was the size of a freaking shoe box. Now, I'm not complaining, I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything, I'm just illustrating the financial situation.
How much do you think my parents were able to pay for my schooling? (I'll give you a hint, the first and last digit is 0, w/o any left padding:-P).
So, how did I manage that minor miracle? I sacraficed a portion of my income for the next 15 years by going into student debt. That's my burden to bear, and I certainly don't whine that I didn't have "a rich mommy and daddy". Suck it up. All you need is a passable credit score, a $300 limit Visa that you charge to and pay on time is more than enough.
As for hiring people with online degrees, I personally wouldn't care if they even had a degree, as long as they had either demonstrable experiance or skills.
But don't sit there and say you were too broke to go to school. Its a lame, lame, LAME, excuse. Sallie Mae will happily take the next 15 years of your salary, a pint of blood, and your firstborn to send you anywhere your heart desires, and that's without any grants/scholarships. Also, on that note, if you can't find a grant or scholarship, you must be extremely lazy, as there are THOUSANDS available, for anyone and anything imaginable.
How many articles have we read that tell us that the boys over at Redmond lack organization? There's the famous story about the two Office development teams that built two versions of Office with incompatible file formats, because neither team knew about the other. There's all the stories about managers being forced to lie to make time table deadlines.
Now, all of that boils down to one simple thing: The left hand REALLY has no idea what the right hand is doing. What makes you think that their marketing team is any different?
Its easy to point the finger and cry that they lied, but is it really a lie if they didn't know any better?
What an asinine and annoying argument that I'm so sick of hearing. Lets try this one:
People that live on mountains don't tumble into the valley rivers. Why? Because they know how far down the slope they're comfortable living and build their homes there.
What does that teach us?
Well, when the "pedophiles and necrophiliacs say 'Hey, we deserve the same rights as gays do!'", we simply say "No, you go back to your cell and be quiet".
1) 9.99? That implies a want all the same music on a CD, which I, and a lot of other P2P users, have found to be a very outmoded format. Of course, I could be happy with 10 songs on a disc too. Woo.
2) Economics. You sell for less, and you make more sales. In theory, if you decrease your margin X and increase sales Y, guess what? You made Y-X more money on the product you sold. In businesses that sell physical material, this often hits a wall when moving all that product cuts into the margin. However, these are bits flying along fiber with little to no cost of transport. The cost to produce these products largely lie in paying for the greed of record execs and recording artists. But, maybe you're right -- maybe the accounts say they'll lose money. But, I bet its not Apple's accounts that say that -- I bet its the recording industries (and maybe they're just being stubborn.
3) Steal vs. copyright infringment. Ya know what? In this case, it really is the same thing. IANAL. I'm betting neither are you. So, lets just drop the semantics for the sake of argument. In this case, people are getting material that they normally have to pay for without paying for it. That is theft, inspite of all the conscience massaging BS that the P2P proponets shove down our throats about how what they're doing isn't wrong or civil disobediance. That's crap. And I've used P2P many times, but at least I'm honest about what it is.
The people that do this ARE organized crime. John Smith, engineering degree from XYZ college, who has a wife and three kids and used to work salary for a legit business doesn't wake up one morning and start a business like this.
No, its Joey Fishhooks who starts this sort of thing. He's already organized crime, and he doesn't bat an eye at dealing with that crowd.
Okay, mod the parent down please.
Its a shame too. Because you had such a good start: $0.99 is WAY to high of a price point for me. I'm not willing to pay $15 for the contents of a CD, sorry. Its just not worth that much to me, and I think a lot of other people probably feel the same way. If they started selling at $0.10 or $0.25 -- then they might have a customer.
Where you got yourself in trouble was mentioning Napster and Metalica. Metalica didn't bring about the downfall of easy P2P (and with the current protocols and clients: uTorrent, eMule, etc), its still not that hard to steal music, if you want too.
Metalica sued because there was unfinished studio recordings being swapped around, and to be honest, its not difficult to see where they're coming from in wanting that material yanked.
Think of it like a sex tape or something else similarly embarassing -- you sure as hell wouldn't want something like that viewable to the world.
Probably because the economic incentives to live here are hard to ignore.
That says absolutely nothing about the sociological climate though.
I'm a citizen, and this is my home, so I would never leave, but a majority of the people in this country are seriously f**ked up.
Creationism anyone? That is considered a serious debate in "These United States". You do realize that the rest of the world looks at ideas like that and laughs at us, right? Not because we have people here at think like that -- all countries have their share of crazies, but because there's enough of them to actually cause a political movement -- in a LARGE democratic country.
Its been my experiance that professors tend to enforce certain rules to satisfy their pet peeves. Some profs care if you attend, others don't -- regardless of whether you learn more while in class or not. This could easily be a similar case -- maybe she just doesn't like staring at laptop lids for an hour or more every day.
Personally, I think its asinine. I always hated when they tried to make me learn "their way". I don't learn a damn thing from listening to someone talk "at" me. I skipped most lectures in college. But, what I did do, was every bit of reading assigned, and then I went to office hours with a list of questions to ask. Only once, in four years, did a professor tell me he had covered my question in class.
I think the GP was striking at the biggest problem with MMOs -- their seemingly nicotinesque additiveness. To be perfectly honest, I never started playing MMOs. Although, that's not to say I haven't toyed around with a friend's account just to see what the game looks and plays like. Now, from that experiance, they looks like a perfectly legitimate and high quality video game experiance.
However, there is something about them that triggers the addiction mechanism is some people. Now, I'm aware that all video games, as well as TV, are addictive. In most cases those, other genres of games tend to be significantly less addictive than MMO.
I'd argue that the "proof is in the pudding", so to speak: when I can get those friends of mine who practically live in their MMO of choice out into the "real world", I often feel like the non-smoker at a table of smokers when all the chatter about thier guild/weapon/whizz-bang-spell-of-the-day starts.
Not to nitpick, but if we're still talking about Pebble Bed Reactors:
Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.
Who said the chip has to compute realistic physics?
Millions of blocks all falling on the same screen takes a ton of CPU time. Now, weather they are falling with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^s is immaterial to CPU time -- millions of real-time collisons take loads of number crunching, realistic or not.
Will someone please explain to me why syntactical ease equates to a "stupid language for monkies"? Just because C# developers don't have to worry about and juggle memory pointers, it doesn't imply that their job is automatically "easier" and therefore "worse" than that of a C/C++ developer. They still have to worry about good OO design, portability of code (yes, even in a VM language like.NET), and just all around good software engineering -- same as a C/C++ developer would.
Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development. A strongly typed language with a predefined API like the.NET Framework gives everyone an even playing field -- it makes code extremely supportable by a wide range of people; everyone who knows.NET can support an app written against the Framework. Not so for C/C++, a windows/Visual Studio C++ developer would certainly struggle after being tossed into a Unix development environment.
Now, this is the same argument as most people with common sense make with Java -- no on says its the right tool for every job, but it certainly can be the right tool for a lot of jobs. The same with C++. Do you really think we ought to code our web apps in C/C++? IF so, then why not just go all out and do it in assembly?
Not if the rest of your code is in C#. You're probably better of using the Novell C# LDAP library.
I know about System.DirectoryServices, but its just a COM interop for the windows standard API -- which dopes ADSI -- which sucks the monkey nut.
It uses Mono to do SSL -- but I stripped that out and used.NET 2.0's SSL stream -- worked like a dream. And it talks real standard LDAP, so you can use it against AD, NDS, etc.
Thats true. However, they're not targeting people who can afford to buy these things themselves, like yourself. They're trying to build a bridge over the "Digital Divide". ie: They're trying to get the starving poor people in 3rd world countries onto the internet.
We'll all ignore that $100 could probably feed the recipents of these laptops for several months.
Slashdot Mirror
get leaps and bounds over my fellow colleagues with only a B.S.
Really? What makes you think that is so? I've talked to 11 people in the higher echelons of technical management around my area, and the concensus was this: An M.S. in C.S. is utterly worthless.
Their reason was simple, all the jobs out there today require at least a small amount of experiance. Now, say a job requires X years of experiance with a M.S., that same job will also include a line such as "X+2 years with an B.S.". It is very rare for a job to REQUIRE a M.S.
Therefore, the two (or more) years you spent in school paying money to learn worthless textbook garbage, could be spent making money in your field.
Of course, this changes drastically when it comes to Ph.D.'s. There are plenty of positions where a PhD is either required or strongly preferred.
Did you find something that dictates this is not the case ?
I'm going back to graduate school soon, to take advantage of a tuition benefit. However, from what I hear, a MBA is one of the more valuable degrees to have, short of a PhD (that'll take WAY too long part time).
Should I be denied a job because I was able to fulfill my other responsibilities while still achieving my degree objectives?
Interesting point, considering your sig:
why are Communist in the US? With Cuba so close, it's like going to KFC when you want a Big Mac!
I'm just sayin'....
Now, a couple of points:
1) I've been living with my wife for four years in various apartments. We also are the guardians of her younger (teenaged) sister. So no, I don't just have myself to support -- I have a family too.
2) I wish I had a mortgage. Where I live, the mortgage on a 3 bedroom home is almost 2/3 of the rent on a 2 bedroom apartment. (I'm looking to buy ASAP, renting is awful)
3) I worked between 20-40 hours a week while in school (nope, haven't had a social life since HS). However, I supplemented my earned income with student loans to help pay living expenses (just as most students do to pay for their dorm rooms). Hence, Sallie Mae owns my soul.
No one said it was easy or for anyone, the point is that it CAN BE and IS done all the time. Of course, your situation might dictate that it wouldn't work for you. There are always exceptions.
I just felt like I needed to point out that the assumpts you made about me, because of my age, were all wrong. Its okay though, I get that all the time.
I'm not saying that doing the student loan thing is a wise decision or not. My point is simply that the money is there, albeit with a 6% APR string attached.
Let's start with my favorite argument of all time:
:-P).
I do not have a rich mommy and daddy to pay for my school
Okay, see that's a complete load of crap. I get that all the time from the people I know that drop out half a semester into a year at a real school, because they can't handle it.
I'm 22 years old. I graduated last summer from the University of Pittsburgh, with a BA and BS (Classics, Computer Science, and Mathematics). While not IV leauge, Pitt certainly is a large, physical, accredited, research institution, that charges roughly $10k/year.
Now, how did I pay for that (4 years + 3 inbetween summer terms too)? Well, I'm the son of a bartender (mother) and a bricklayer (father). They divorced when I was three. I grew up in a 2 bedroom apartment that was the size of a freaking shoe box. Now, I'm not complaining, I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything, I'm just illustrating the financial situation.
How much do you think my parents were able to pay for my schooling? (I'll give you a hint, the first and last digit is 0, w/o any left padding
So, how did I manage that minor miracle? I sacraficed a portion of my income for the next 15 years by going into student debt. That's my burden to bear, and I certainly don't whine that I didn't have "a rich mommy and daddy". Suck it up. All you need is a passable credit score, a $300 limit Visa that you charge to and pay on time is more than enough.
As for hiring people with online degrees, I personally wouldn't care if they even had a degree, as long as they had either demonstrable experiance or skills.
But don't sit there and say you were too broke to go to school. Its a lame, lame, LAME, excuse. Sallie Mae will happily take the next 15 years of your salary, a pint of blood, and your firstborn to send you anywhere your heart desires, and that's without any grants/scholarships. Also, on that note, if you can't find a grant or scholarship, you must be extremely lazy, as there are THOUSANDS available, for anyone and anything imaginable.
Yea! I agree. Why the hell did I have to pay so much money for this computer anyway? I can go to the beach and get all the silicon I want for free!
/idiot
How many articles have we read that tell us that the boys over at Redmond lack organization? There's the famous story about the two Office development teams that built two versions of Office with incompatible file formats, because neither team knew about the other. There's all the stories about managers being forced to lie to make time table deadlines.
Now, all of that boils down to one simple thing: The left hand REALLY has no idea what the right hand is doing. What makes you think that their marketing team is any different?
Its easy to point the finger and cry that they lied, but is it really a lie if they didn't know any better?
I'm not in the military, but doesn't "conduct unbecoming" finish with "of an officer"?
Somehow, I don't think he's officer material.
No, that's just all the malware that got installed when you were browsing with IE.
I agree with the first response to your post, but just to play devil's advocate:
What FUD would someone spread to help lighter sales?
Oh, I know! The END is nigh and to survive you will NEED fire. Don't rub sticks like your ancestors, buy bic while your paper money still has value!
Sorry.
"slippery slope"
What an asinine and annoying argument that I'm so sick of hearing. Lets try this one:
People that live on mountains don't tumble into the valley rivers. Why? Because they know how far down the slope they're comfortable living and build their homes there.
What does that teach us?
Well, when the "pedophiles and necrophiliacs say 'Hey, we deserve the same rights as gays do!'", we simply say "No, you go back to your cell and be quiet".
1) 9.99? That implies a want all the same music on a CD, which I, and a lot of other P2P users, have found to be a very outmoded format. Of course, I could be happy with 10 songs on a disc too. Woo.
2) Economics. You sell for less, and you make more sales. In theory, if you decrease your margin X and increase sales Y, guess what? You made Y-X more money on the product you sold. In businesses that sell physical material, this often hits a wall when moving all that product cuts into the margin. However, these are bits flying along fiber with little to no cost of transport. The cost to produce these products largely lie in paying for the greed of record execs and recording artists. But, maybe you're right -- maybe the accounts say they'll lose money. But, I bet its not Apple's accounts that say that -- I bet its the recording industries (and maybe they're just being stubborn.
3) Steal vs. copyright infringment. Ya know what? In this case, it really is the same thing. IANAL. I'm betting neither are you. So, lets just drop the semantics for the sake of argument. In this case, people are getting material that they normally have to pay for without paying for it. That is theft, inspite of all the conscience massaging BS that the P2P proponets shove down our throats about how what they're doing isn't wrong or civil disobediance. That's crap. And I've used P2P many times, but at least I'm honest about what it is.
Simple:
The people that do this ARE organized crime. John Smith, engineering degree from XYZ college, who has a wife and three kids and used to work salary for a legit business doesn't wake up one morning and start a business like this.
No, its Joey Fishhooks who starts this sort of thing. He's already organized crime, and he doesn't bat an eye at dealing with that crowd.
Okay, mod the parent down please. Its a shame too. Because you had such a good start: $0.99 is WAY to high of a price point for me. I'm not willing to pay $15 for the contents of a CD, sorry. Its just not worth that much to me, and I think a lot of other people probably feel the same way. If they started selling at $0.10 or $0.25 -- then they might have a customer.
Where you got yourself in trouble was mentioning Napster and Metalica. Metalica didn't bring about the downfall of easy P2P (and with the current protocols and clients: uTorrent, eMule, etc), its still not that hard to steal music, if you want too.
Metalica sued because there was unfinished studio recordings being swapped around, and to be honest, its not difficult to see where they're coming from in wanting that material yanked.
Think of it like a sex tape or something else similarly embarassing -- you sure as hell wouldn't want something like that viewable to the world.
After all, freedom is beautiful, when viewed at 640x480 in 256 colors.
Probably because the economic incentives to live here are hard to ignore.
That says absolutely nothing about the sociological climate though.
I'm a citizen, and this is my home, so I would never leave, but a majority of the people in this country are seriously f**ked up.
Creationism anyone? That is considered a serious debate in "These United States". You do realize that the rest of the world looks at ideas like that and laughs at us, right? Not because we have people here at think like that -- all countries have their share of crazies, but because there's enough of them to actually cause a political movement -- in a LARGE democratic country.
Not calling you an idiot or liar.....but what platform are you running that there isn't a JVM for?
Yup. Better not throw away all those damned nuclear warheads that have hundreds of years left in their "useful life".
::goes back under the bridge::
Okay, thats enough of that.
Who said she actually determined that?
Its been my experiance that professors tend to enforce certain rules to satisfy their pet peeves. Some profs care if you attend, others don't -- regardless of whether you learn more while in class or not. This could easily be a similar case -- maybe she just doesn't like staring at laptop lids for an hour or more every day.
Personally, I think its asinine. I always hated when they tried to make me learn "their way". I don't learn a damn thing from listening to someone talk "at" me. I skipped most lectures in college. But, what I did do, was every bit of reading assigned, and then I went to office hours with a list of questions to ask. Only once, in four years, did a professor tell me he had covered my question in class.
But, that was just how I learned.
I think the GP was striking at the biggest problem with MMOs -- their seemingly nicotinesque additiveness. To be perfectly honest, I never started playing MMOs. Although, that's not to say I haven't toyed around with a friend's account just to see what the game looks and plays like. Now, from that experiance, they looks like a perfectly legitimate and high quality video game experiance.
However, there is something about them that triggers the addiction mechanism is some people. Now, I'm aware that all video games, as well as TV, are addictive. In most cases those, other genres of games tend to be significantly less addictive than MMO.
I'd argue that the "proof is in the pudding", so to speak: when I can get those friends of mine who practically live in their MMO of choice out into the "real world", I often feel like the non-smoker at a table of smokers when all the chatter about thier guild/weapon/whizz-bang-spell-of-the-day starts.
Not to nitpick, but if we're still talking about Pebble Bed Reactors:
Instead of water, it uses pyrolytic graphite as the neutron moderator, and an inert or semi-inert gas such as helium, nitrogen or carbon dioxide as the coolant, at very high temperature, to drive a turbine directly.
From this Wikipedia Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor/
Who said the chip has to compute realistic physics?
Millions of blocks all falling on the same screen takes a ton of CPU time. Now, weather they are falling with an acceleration of 9.8 m/s^s is immaterial to CPU time -- millions of real-time collisons take loads of number crunching, realistic or not.
Will someone please explain to me why syntactical ease equates to a "stupid language for monkies"? Just because C# developers don't have to worry about and juggle memory pointers, it doesn't imply that their job is automatically "easier" and therefore "worse" than that of a C/C++ developer. They still have to worry about good OO design, portability of code (yes, even in a VM language like .NET), and just all around good software engineering -- same as a C/C++ developer would.
.NET Framework gives everyone an even playing field -- it makes code extremely supportable by a wide range of people; everyone who knows .NET can support an app written against the Framework. Not so for C/C++, a windows/Visual Studio C++ developer would certainly struggle after being tossed into a Unix development environment.
Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development. A strongly typed language with a predefined API like the
Now, this is the same argument as most people with common sense make with Java -- no on says its the right tool for every job, but it certainly can be the right tool for a lot of jobs. The same with C++. Do you really think we ought to code our web apps in C/C++? IF so, then why not just go all out and do it in assembly?
Well, thats why Palm decided to release the next Treo with Windows Mobile.
yea yea, I know this is Slashdot and anything Windows is a hideous computing platform, but honestly, PalmOS is worse.
Not if the rest of your code is in C#. You're probably better of using the Novell C# LDAP library.
.NET 2.0's SSL stream -- worked like a dream. And it talks real standard LDAP, so you can use it against AD, NDS, etc.
I know about System.DirectoryServices, but its just a COM interop for the windows standard API -- which dopes ADSI -- which sucks the monkey nut.
It uses Mono to do SSL -- but I stripped that out and used
Thats true. However, they're not targeting people who can afford to buy these things themselves, like yourself. They're trying to build a bridge over the "Digital Divide". ie: They're trying to get the starving poor people in 3rd world countries onto the internet.
We'll all ignore that $100 could probably feed the recipents of these laptops for several months.