You'd be surprised how well the subconscious can handle a car. I know when I get extremely tired or I'm sick, I tend to zone out and let my subconscious take over and it drives remarkably well. Better than if I am consciously driving the vehicle actually. My subconscious doesn't even go over the speed limit.
I'm a sysadmin who used to work at a web development company. As a one man team I managed ~40 servers, 8 of them being in production web servers hosting 200-300 sites each.
Web developers should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a production server. The last time I let one onto one, I spent the next day and a half fixing what he broke.
On the flip side, sometimes developers will just flat out need access. In this case, at least in my experience, a clone does the job just as well. You just need to have a couple servers sitting around specifically for development use, and then have a way to clone machines to this hardware in short order. In my years of experience I have yet to come across a problem that absolutely needed to be tackled on a production server.
A lot of people here are IT staff in one sense or another, its pretty common for other readers to side with the IT workers like themselves instead of the bosses / company.
You can't make a proper judgement without both sides of the story, but that's never stopped anyone from passing judgement anyway.
Agreed. Psychology is pure awesome and personally, I'm doing everything I can short of going back to school to learn as much as I can about it. It's really fascinating, plus it helps in day to day activities in terms of not getting played, for lack of a better term.
In this case we are referring to a slip of the tongue that you were not aware of, which classifies as a unconscious slip. I said "Good Times" without consciously realizing that this was the name of the second track on the disk.
Subconscious and unconscious tend to get interchanged in common speak nowadays, so the confusion is understandable.
Beware the powers of nostalgia my friend.
Just reading through this tread has brought back a wash of memories from my Windows 95 days. Playing Hover, the Buddy Holly video on the install disc, the blue screens...
You're responsible for maintaining operations -- productivity and personal conduct is none of your concern. If you make it your concern, you're almost certainly exceeding your authority.
If the amount of data flowing back and forth to Facebook causes a problem, you can raise this as a concern, along with technical evaluations of possible solutions. But to go in and see just what people do on Facebook isn't your job, and if you have made it so, you're the wrong person for your job.
It is part of my job to make sure that the IT systems are used appropriately, and within our AUP. Any use breaching the AUP is most certainly my concern.
I don't care what people do on Facebook. That isn't my concern. My concern is what the hell are you using my network for your personal crap for? Work network is for work purposes. If you aren't doing work, you won't be on the network for long if I have anything to say about it (And I certainly do:))
To reiterate: Its not what you are doing on a given site that is a problem, its the fact that you are there in the first place, on work time. Workplaces have a right to monitor their employees to make sure those employees are doing what they are supposed to be doing (i.e their job)
considering your nick, you seem very pro-employer. Ah, you mean Steve? Ah...
Yes, I mean Steve:).
Based on some things I've read here and elsewhere, it's not necessarily desirable to monitor/everything/. There are things you should watch, and things you shouldn't. This is one of the balancing acts that we in this line of work must perform, and it's not clear where the rope is. If you've got written instruction from a higher-up to do it, good, keep a copy of it somewhere, but also keep in mind that CYAs don't always validly do what they nominally should. This aspect of our work is only going to get more and more difficult, and maybe after a few high-profile cases of admins getting fscked (no I don't mean the network guy from California), we'll organize and do something to protect ourselves (no, I don't necessarily mean a union).
True, monitoring everything would be ridiculous. I only monitor what I need to monitor - I have better things to do than dig into people's personal lives. It is difficult to find the line on this one. I still struggle with it from time to time. In general I only watch if I think there is a reason to in the first place. Still, no one should ever assume they are not being watched on a company computer. They should always assume they are being watched and that should be at the forefront of their thinking. If you wouldn't browse to it with your boss looking over your shoulder, don't browse to it at all.
I'm usually asked to go digging. There are some things that I'll bring to the higher ups (Caught someone torrenting not too long ago as an example), but I don't go reading everyone's web traffic. I read a generalized report and if something looks off, then I start to dig from there.
I haven't had any of this backlash on me yet. When new staff are hired they have to sign a policy that basically says nothing they do on work machines or the work network is private, and it all will be monitored. It isn't all monitored, but we reserve the right to do so if we feel the need.
When you go to your workplace, you are using the company's systems. The company has a right to monitor any and all activity on that system, since they own it. That is their right. Period. If you don't want to be monitored, don't use the company systems. Oh wait, can't do your job without the company's system? The door is over that way, don't let it hit you on the way out.
I can understand not being monitored on cameras and whatnot, but I can tell you right now, as a sysadmin, I monitor just about everything on my network and I'll be damned if anyone is ever going to stop me from that practice. The day I'm not allowed to monitor everything on the network is the day I quit my job of 20 years.
Modern OS takes up to 20GB once you tack on log files, temp files, etc.
This could *easily* replace the notion of using a disk drive for your OS install. Disk drives could purely be used for mass storage.
Better question: Why would anyone EVER sign up for a job that started with a clause saying if they fired you, you can't work in the industry again for a year.
Do you not understand how fundamentally stupid it would be to agree to that? As soon as that even came out of their mouths I'd tell them to shove their job right up their collective asses. No job is worth signing that clause.
A year is enough time for your life to completely collapse around you.
You don't lose the film, you claim it was lost which makes all the fanboys foam at the mouth at the mere thought of "new" star wars content they haven't seen.
Before algebra, there's no conception of an equation taught to children. So, the results are unsurprising.
What school system did you go to? I knew what an equation was long before I knew anything about algebra.
But the study was for middle school students (pedantic note: you implied elementary school children in your post), that is, people at least through pre-algebra. So I don't think "x" would have been so mystifying.
I said children, I didn't imply how old because the study never really says actual age groups, it just lumps them into middle school. Where I'm from, "Middle school" can be anything from grade 4 to grade 10. Pretty big difference in skillsets within that range.
I didn't understand what was trying to be said. Maybe spaces would have helped.
This I will give you. Using brackets in the middle of a math eqauation instead of a blank or a space is pretty silly. An underscore would have done the job best I would think.
But in general middle school children get the shaft. I had my 5th grade cousin ask for help on his math homework, and there were literally a half dozen contradictory answers that would be valid based on the assumptions taken in his word problem. (Does "ways it can be arranged" refer to combinations or permutations, can each option be used more than once, can the null option be used (only valid if each option can be used more than once, as otherwise it was required) or can the null option be used more than once (only valid if the other options cannot) ). Kids are bad at math cause we spoonfeed them crap with 800 assumptions, never explaining what they are. And we wonder why they cannot generalize like we can.
This is true for the most part as well. My father taught me one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned while I was in this age range, and it helped me get past most of this easily. Occam's Razor - The simplest answer is likely the correct answer. If you tackle math word problems like this, you can usually puzzle it out and get whatever the teacher is looking for. If you have a tendency to over think a problem, you will likely come to an incorrect conclusion that most others wouldn't have even considered. I noticed this a lot when marking tests and whatnot during my school years. There would always be outliers who would come up with some ridiculous answer to a word problem because they overcomplicated it.
Let's tackle that first if statement. If there is a statement with an equals sign in the middle... this means an equation with the equals relationship in between two expressions. It's not immediately apparent that there was an equation at all, let alone one with an equality relationship. "=()+" could be an operator... nothing about it starting with '=' implies it's not. "==" or "===" are considered different operators, why shouldn't "=()+"?
Pretty sure the "equa" part of "equation" is self explanatory, but I guess not. At the stage of math they are at, if there is an equals sign, it can be assumed there is an equation of some sort. "=()+" is not an operator. It's also a pretty fair assumption that an operator won't have a bunch of spaces in it. The original problem had spaces in between all those characters, clearly indicating that it is NOT an operator. Stop over thinking the problem. These are grade school children for crying out loud, not calculus students.
And in the case of the second if: If there is a blank space... First, a better represntation of the blank sapce would be ___. Second, the blank space has no mathematical meaning. If you used a variable, then the equation could be true, and you could solve for x. But I can write a false equation: 2+2=9. Are you saying it's obvious to everyone that I think you should white-out the bottom part of one of the 2s to make it a 7? After all, that's modifying the equation to make it true.
Who cares what a blank space is represented as? It doesn't matter. Again, completely over thinking the problem. Child sees blank space. Put number in blank to solve problem. That is as simple as this is. You could use a variable just as easily as a blank space, but for school children who have not taken an algebra class yet a blank space would be easier to understand for them.
Only on slashdot could people over think a math problem designed for children.
I was a math tutor throughout my school years since I was grasping the concepts quicker than most of the other students. I tutored kids in more advanced math classes than I was in by the time I made it to high school. So I guess I fall under teaching.
I drew that conclusion because I am young enough that I still remember being a child. I recall learning how to use an equals sign and the concepts behind it long before the word algebra was even introduced to me, let alone the concept of replacing numbers with letters as variables.
Slashdot Mirror
That all depends on what you define as common if you really want to get all nitpicky about it...
You'd be surprised how well the subconscious can handle a car. I know when I get extremely tired or I'm sick, I tend to zone out and let my subconscious take over and it drives remarkably well. Better than if I am consciously driving the vehicle actually. My subconscious doesn't even go over the speed limit.
I'm a sysadmin who used to work at a web development company. As a one man team I managed ~40 servers, 8 of them being in production web servers hosting 200-300 sites each.
Web developers should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a production server. The last time I let one onto one, I spent the next day and a half fixing what he broke.
On the flip side, sometimes developers will just flat out need access. In this case, at least in my experience, a clone does the job just as well. You just need to have a couple servers sitting around specifically for development use, and then have a way to clone machines to this hardware in short order. In my years of experience I have yet to come across a problem that absolutely needed to be tackled on a production server.
I remember playing that game for many an hour. Good times.
A lot of people here are IT staff in one sense or another, its pretty common for other readers to side with the IT workers like themselves instead of the bosses / company. You can't make a proper judgement without both sides of the story, but that's never stopped anyone from passing judgement anyway.
Agreed. Psychology is pure awesome and personally, I'm doing everything I can short of going back to school to learn as much as I can about it. It's really fascinating, plus it helps in day to day activities in terms of not getting played, for lack of a better term.
No, I meant what I said.
In this case we are referring to a slip of the tongue that you were not aware of, which classifies as a unconscious slip. I said "Good Times" without consciously realizing that this was the name of the second track on the disk.
Subconscious and unconscious tend to get interchanged in common speak nowadays, so the confusion is understandable.
Beware the powers of nostalgia my friend. Just reading through this tread has brought back a wash of memories from my Windows 95 days. Playing Hover, the Buddy Holly video on the install disc, the blue screens...
Basically an unconscious slip of the tongue. Wiki is your friend!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_slip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edie_Brickell
Edie Brickell's Good Times, Bad Times.
It makes me smile that someone else remembers this. I remember watching it when I first installed back in the day... Good times.
Or you know, they could have left it in KM and not be idiots. Oh wait, American site. I almost forgot.
You're responsible for maintaining operations -- productivity and personal conduct is none of your concern. If you make it your concern, you're almost certainly exceeding your authority. If the amount of data flowing back and forth to Facebook causes a problem, you can raise this as a concern, along with technical evaluations of possible solutions. But to go in and see just what people do on Facebook isn't your job, and if you have made it so, you're the wrong person for your job.
It is part of my job to make sure that the IT systems are used appropriately, and within our AUP. Any use breaching the AUP is most certainly my concern. I don't care what people do on Facebook. That isn't my concern. My concern is what the hell are you using my network for your personal crap for? Work network is for work purposes. If you aren't doing work, you won't be on the network for long if I have anything to say about it (And I certainly do :))
To reiterate: Its not what you are doing on a given site that is a problem, its the fact that you are there in the first place, on work time. Workplaces have a right to monitor their employees to make sure those employees are doing what they are supposed to be doing (i.e their job)
considering your nick, you seem very pro-employer. Ah, you mean Steve? Ah...
Yes, I mean Steve :).
Based on some things I've read here and elsewhere, it's not necessarily desirable to monitor /everything/. There are things you should watch, and things you shouldn't. This is one of the balancing acts that we in this line of work must perform, and it's not clear where the rope is. If you've got written instruction from a higher-up to do it, good, keep a copy of it somewhere, but also keep in mind that CYAs don't always validly do what they nominally should. This aspect of our work is only going to get more and more difficult, and maybe after a few high-profile cases of admins getting fscked (no I don't mean the network guy from California), we'll organize and do something to protect ourselves (no, I don't necessarily mean a union).
True, monitoring everything would be ridiculous. I only monitor what I need to monitor - I have better things to do than dig into people's personal lives. It is difficult to find the line on this one. I still struggle with it from time to time. In general I only watch if I think there is a reason to in the first place. Still, no one should ever assume they are not being watched on a company computer. They should always assume they are being watched and that should be at the forefront of their thinking. If you wouldn't browse to it with your boss looking over your shoulder, don't browse to it at all. I'm usually asked to go digging. There are some things that I'll bring to the higher ups (Caught someone torrenting not too long ago as an example), but I don't go reading everyone's web traffic. I read a generalized report and if something looks off, then I start to dig from there.
I haven't had any of this backlash on me yet. When new staff are hired they have to sign a policy that basically says nothing they do on work machines or the work network is private, and it all will be monitored. It isn't all monitored, but we reserve the right to do so if we feel the need.
When you go to your workplace, you are using the company's systems. The company has a right to monitor any and all activity on that system, since they own it. That is their right. Period. If you don't want to be monitored, don't use the company systems. Oh wait, can't do your job without the company's system? The door is over that way, don't let it hit you on the way out.
I can understand not being monitored on cameras and whatnot, but I can tell you right now, as a sysadmin, I monitor just about everything on my network and I'll be damned if anyone is ever going to stop me from that practice. The day I'm not allowed to monitor everything on the network is the day I quit my job of 20 years.
We can make it rounder dammit!
Modern OS takes up to 20GB once you tack on log files, temp files, etc. This could *easily* replace the notion of using a disk drive for your OS install. Disk drives could purely be used for mass storage.
Better question: Why would anyone EVER sign up for a job that started with a clause saying if they fired you, you can't work in the industry again for a year.
Do you not understand how fundamentally stupid it would be to agree to that? As soon as that even came out of their mouths I'd tell them to shove their job right up their collective asses. No job is worth signing that clause.
A year is enough time for your life to completely collapse around you.
Getting a +5 on slashdot is as simple as posting some mindless drivel and having a bunch of your circlejerking buddies mod it up for you.
It's a pretty rare sight to actually see something Insightful modded as such.
You don't lose the film, you claim it was lost which makes all the fanboys foam at the mouth at the mere thought of "new" star wars content they haven't seen.
Before algebra, there's no conception of an equation taught to children. So, the results are unsurprising.
What school system did you go to? I knew what an equation was long before I knew anything about algebra.
But the study was for middle school students (pedantic note: you implied elementary school children in your post), that is, people at least through pre-algebra. So I don't think "x" would have been so mystifying.
I said children, I didn't imply how old because the study never really says actual age groups, it just lumps them into middle school. Where I'm from, "Middle school" can be anything from grade 4 to grade 10. Pretty big difference in skillsets within that range.
I didn't understand what was trying to be said. Maybe spaces would have helped.
This I will give you. Using brackets in the middle of a math eqauation instead of a blank or a space is pretty silly. An underscore would have done the job best I would think.
But in general middle school children get the shaft. I had my 5th grade cousin ask for help on his math homework, and there were literally a half dozen contradictory answers that would be valid based on the assumptions taken in his word problem. (Does "ways it can be arranged" refer to combinations or permutations, can each option be used more than once, can the null option be used (only valid if each option can be used more than once, as otherwise it was required) or can the null option be used more than once (only valid if the other options cannot) ). Kids are bad at math cause we spoonfeed them crap with 800 assumptions, never explaining what they are. And we wonder why they cannot generalize like we can.
This is true for the most part as well. My father taught me one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned while I was in this age range, and it helped me get past most of this easily. Occam's Razor - The simplest answer is likely the correct answer. If you tackle math word problems like this, you can usually puzzle it out and get whatever the teacher is looking for. If you have a tendency to over think a problem, you will likely come to an incorrect conclusion that most others wouldn't have even considered. I noticed this a lot when marking tests and whatnot during my school years. There would always be outliers who would come up with some ridiculous answer to a word problem because they overcomplicated it.
Let's tackle that first if statement. If there is a statement with an equals sign in the middle... this means an equation with the equals relationship in between two expressions. It's not immediately apparent that there was an equation at all, let alone one with an equality relationship. "=()+" could be an operator... nothing about it starting with '=' implies it's not. "==" or "===" are considered different operators, why shouldn't "=()+"?
Pretty sure the "equa" part of "equation" is self explanatory, but I guess not. At the stage of math they are at, if there is an equals sign, it can be assumed there is an equation of some sort. "=()+" is not an operator. It's also a pretty fair assumption that an operator won't have a bunch of spaces in it. The original problem had spaces in between all those characters, clearly indicating that it is NOT an operator. Stop over thinking the problem. These are grade school children for crying out loud, not calculus students.
And in the case of the second if: If there is a blank space... First, a better represntation of the blank sapce would be ___. Second, the blank space has no mathematical meaning. If you used a variable, then the equation could be true, and you could solve for x. But I can write a false equation: 2+2=9. Are you saying it's obvious to everyone that I think you should white-out the bottom part of one of the 2s to make it a 7? After all, that's modifying the equation to make it true.
Who cares what a blank space is represented as? It doesn't matter. Again, completely over thinking the problem. Child sees blank space. Put number in blank to solve problem. That is as simple as this is. You could use a variable just as easily as a blank space, but for school children who have not taken an algebra class yet a blank space would be easier to understand for them.
Only on slashdot could people over think a math problem designed for children.
I was a math tutor throughout my school years since I was grasping the concepts quicker than most of the other students. I tutored kids in more advanced math classes than I was in by the time I made it to high school. So I guess I fall under teaching.
I drew that conclusion because I am young enough that I still remember being a child. I recall learning how to use an equals sign and the concepts behind it long before the word algebra was even introduced to me, let alone the concept of replacing numbers with letters as variables.
Yes, because grade school kids will understand algebra.
A child will understand "There is a blank space, fill in the blank" easier than "Here is a letter, replace this letter with a number".
Public schooled kids are typically behind home schooled kids because instead of a 1 to 1 ratio, its a 1 to 30-40 ratio. News at 11.