My otherwise useless cable modem provider, Charter, pointed this out to me when I signed up, so apparently they don't have a problem with my "stealing" cable.
Unfortunately, my wife never watched TV before I hooked it up to the cable, and now she's totally obsessed by Animal Planet.
Here's the perspective from twenty years down the road:
Of course you should go to college. That doesn't mean you should go to college right now.
College can teach you about a lot of useful things. It probably won't teach you how to be a system administrator, but believe me, as cool as a sysadmin gig sounds now, you won't want to do the same damn thing for the next forty to fifty years. Lack of education might not be a barrier to getting a job, but it can be a real barrier to advancing your career, which you will want to do sooner or later.
College can teach you skills that you can take to any job, and that you will need to have an enjoyable life--how to think, how to write, how to figure stuff out for yourself. If you live on campus, you will also learn social skills. You might also have the opportunity to study abroad, which is a lot of fun. Japan is really a geek paradise.
Having said that, I think a lot of people rush straight into college from high school. I did, and I regret it now. A lot of what you get out of school depends on the maturity that you bring with you, and you can grow up a lot working for a living full time. Also, if you save your money before college, you won't get into debt (which will give you more freedom later) and college will be more comfortable if you have money to spend. The girls will like you, Girls_don't_like_me, if you're old enough to buy alcohol and have the money to pay for it. You'll get better financial aid if you're supporting yourself, anyway.
In any case, it's probably too late to get into a good school this year if you're about to graduate. Take a year or two, put all the money you can in the bank, and apply to the best possible school you can.
Six months seems pretty tight to roll out a new programming team, even if they're all in the same room. How critical is this project? If you have "deep pockets" for it, despite budget cuts, it sounds important. If so, it's probably not a good candidate for a new, untested mode of operation.
I heard a little sound byte about this on WMUK (the Kalamazoo NPR station) and in an interview prior to the hearing one of the attendees--Fred Upton, I think--said something patently nonsensical...I think it was "the whole.kids domain will be protected by a firewall". It made it sound like Upton is in the pocket of the vendor who will, naturally, "provide the tools" "to protect our children", i.e., sell the government one more case of snake oil.
So obviously one can't run a home business out of a small apartment
You can, but the part that you write off has to be dedicated to the business. You can't say that it's an office part of the time and something else the rest of the time.
If you run your own business, such as drumming up business for someone else, you can claim milage, gasoline, and a 1/4th of your living space expenses as a business expense.
You have to show that any business expenses that you write off are part of your business. Sure, you can say you took a loss, but you'll have a hard time convincing the IRS that every single mile that you drove was driven on the way to putting up signs. You also must show that any living space that you write off is used only for your business, i.e., you can't call your living room or kitchen a home office. Writing off home rent/utilities at home is one of the flags that may make the IRS look at your return very closely.
Wasn't it John W. Campbell that made all of the early advances with Campbellian Science Fiction?
Yeah, but Joseph Campbell is a different guy. He wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces which identified several plot elements (maybe 22 or 23, it's been a long time) that many epics (in the Western tradition) frequently use. The two that I can remember off the top of my head: there's something mysterious about the hero's father (he's a god, or Darth Vader, or whatever) and the hero initially refuses to go on the quest that he's called to do.
Campbell is more of an anthropologist than a literary critic, but a lot of writers were interested in his work. John Barth, for instance, wrote a lot about Cambell, and his novel Giles Goat Boy was a very self-conscious exploration (or if you insist, deconstruction) of Campbell's ideas.
Anyway, Star Wars was ripped off from Jack Kirby's New Gods comic, not Joseph Campbell.
He'll get a working model in about ten years
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Our planet is on a collision course with something that we, at our present state of knowledge, don't have a word for. A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object, so massive that no light can leave it. What I'm talking about is something like that, except that it isn't so much gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are soon to be sucked into the body of eternity. My model points to 11:18 am, Greenwich Mean Time, December 21, 2012 AD.
~Terence McKenna
Of course, McKenna was a (another) drugged-out nutcase, and (I believe) later decided he was wrong about a temporaral singularity, but it's (still) fun to make the connection.
And LaTeX has been in use since 1986 IIRC. The current version (LaTeX2e) dates from 1994. I'm not sure the first PowerPC was commercialised at that time. [...snip...] If you have some name of program used before LaTeX and still in use, could you name them for us? Thank you!
1. You should do what makes you happy. The whole point of a job is to have the money that lets you do the things you really want to do. Pursuing a career for any other reason is climbing onto a treadmill that you may never leave.
2. It's would be bad not to change majors if your interests change. Twenty years later, the thought of being locked into decisions I made as an 18-year-old gives me the chills. It's easy to believe now that you know exactly what you want from life, but believe me, you don't. Learn the things that will serve you whatever you do--how to write, how to think, how to appreciate good things like art and music, and how to pick up women. This is your best change to learn that stuff.
3. Anyway, employers care about more than your technical training. Fair or not, the name of your school means a lot, no matter what you did there. Do you come off as an asshole in an interview? This will almost always overshadow your technical qualifications. Really, liberal arts classes where you spend a lot of time talking with non-geeks can help with this (although it's not a magic bullet, and you don't need to major in a humanities area to benefit from this experience.)
4. The world is full of developers who don't really understand their problem domain. Computers are pervasive everywhere, and there are always opportunitites to develop in areas that interest you. I think it's probably true that there aren't enough programmers that understand the subtleties of the problem that they're trying to solve outside the subtleties of the code.
I've read the book. I've gotten through some pretty dry stuff just for pleasure, but I have to say I really don't think the book is so much "beautifully written" as "beautifully researched" or "closely footnoted". It looks like Infinite Jest on the page, but it sure doesn't read that way.
I'm sure there are people who like this kind of writing--maybe the same people who think Ken Burns understands jazz--but to me it comes off a little too dispassionate for what is basically a human interest story.
Right. What I meant, which wasn't clear from my post, was "unless you're a small enough business that you make all of the decisions about everything yourself." I wholeheartedly agree that a business specialist, such as a lawyer, should make this decision rather than a technical specialist, but that specialist might not be the CEO.
Unless you're running your whole business, you shouldn't be making policy about document archiving--you should be implementing it. It's true that there might be technical issues (such as "how do we preseve (or destroy) documents on laptops in remote offices") but it's totally ass-backwards to make business decisions on these issues.
I think that different branches of the government have different hiring priorities, and it's hard to generalize about "the government" as a single institution.
I don't have any military background, as either a contractor or soldier, but I believe the posts about the military preferring experience over domain-specific training. However, I do have experience with civil administration (more than I should have, really) and my experience has been that education is very highly valued. I expect that most of the PhD's in Philosophy who aren't teaching or flipping burgers work for the government. I've certainly heard that the State Department is that way...the great salt lick of social science PhD's who don't go on to teach.
Having said that, I'll go ahead and generalize about the government vs. the private sector--there's a huge difference in views on equal opportunity. I not-to-recently moved in the opposite direction--from government & education to the private sector--and it sure looks like all white folks all the time to me. When I point this out to management, they give me a very thinly veiled "but they'll steal the office supplies!" speech, and insist that they need to go check their voice mail. Maybe it's just the particular company I work for, or the Midwest, but it feels like there are very different ideas about EOE.
Stallman: Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous.
It's a stupid requirement, sure, but would you hire someone who can't (or won't) problem-solve? Apart from the obvious technical solutions, you could go to Kinko's, or ask a friend, or whatever. If this is a showstopper for a job applicant, they're either an idiot or a prima donna.Neither one makes a very good employee.
I think a lot of HAL's voice interface was just a dramatic device to make it really, really clear that something was going wrong with the computer. It would have been an even more boring movie if Dave and Gary sat around talking about the erratic performance of the expert system software. Similarly, it would have been far less dramatic if, when Dave is locked out, he simply said to himself, "I guess there's a serious bug in the computer" and disassembles a prop that isn't talking back.
It's true that HAL became the most interesting character in the movie, but I think that was really unintentional. If you take away the dramatic device, the whole point of HAL is that he doesn't understand the value of life and doesn't think at all like a human, even if he sounds like one. He totally fails the Turing test.
I spent a lot of time last year looking for open source accounting software. I'm not happy about it, but I would not recommend open source enterprise accounting to anyone who wants to keep their job/business.
Cost: Yes, commercial accounting systems are incredibly expensive. Unfortunately, fucking up your financials is far, far more expensive than investing money in good, supported software. Call a few lawyers and accountings who do auditing and ask for quotes on hourly rates if you're not sure. Bad accounting will ruin a business very, very quickly.
Reliability: I believe in the basic cathedral/bazaar theory, but there just aren't enough people writing and using open source enterprise accounting packages for the theory to apply. Unless there are tens of thousands of users, I have to assume that there are bugs in the system and I don't know where they are. See costs, above.
Personnel: if I need to hire someone from a temp agency to sit at a workstation and do AR for a few days, I don't want to spend half the time I'm paying an outrageous fee training them on an obscure system or how to use their damn operating system. If I need to have someone set up the system (as I am not an accountant), and pay truly outrageous amounts for their time, I sure don't want to spend thousands of dollars getting them familiarized with the system. Especially when they will still be punting on decisions that can affect the system years later.
Everything that I've said isn't true if there's an open source solution that becomes widely used...but accounting is really the last area of your business where you want to be on the bleeding edge of software development. In other areas, the bleeding edge might give you a competitive advantage, but in accounting, you will just plain bleed.
...and I decided to do something else (mostly writing) rather than grow to hate one of the few things that I was good at and enjoyed.
It was a terrible, terrible mistake.
I always hacked around in my spare time, and eventually pulled myself out of semi-poverty writing CGIs for "web developers" (Thanks, Mr. Wall!) but when I started doing programming full-time I realized that a.) I would never get tired of it, and b.) I was ten years behind.
Believe me, you'll get sick of the stuff that you do instead of programming a lot sooner that you get sick of writing code. I would quit jobs every few years, but I have never really considered a career change since I came home to the great silicon salt lick. I may hate the company I work for, but I never get tired of my work.
Working at other kinds of jobs taught some very valuable things that I couldn't have learned from geeks--how to write, how to manage people, and how to seduce women. Still, every day I wish I had started five years earlier.
I believe in my heart that one day Lord of Light will be recognized outside of the science fiction ghetto. When Zelazny was on, he was as inventive a stylist as any of his "literary" contemporaries.
Phillip K Dick was original in every way. I still read Ubik every few years, and it still fucks me up. I think his work is incredibly influential on pop (i.e., TV and movie) science fiction. The Matrix is pure PKD. I think he really writes about the uncertainties of his era in a way no one else did, and wrote about drugs in a way that nobody but Burroughs (whom I don't really like) could, and that's the kind of thing that folks 50+ years hence will get from him.
I really like Neal Stephanson, too, but I can't really call him inventive, as almost everything he does is lifted straight from V era Thomas Pynchon.
I've been properly brainwashed in the Open Source way, and I use XML all the time as an interchange mechanism, but you'll have to pry Crystal Reports from my cold, dead fingers.
I have spent a lot of time training non-technical users to get their own damn reports from databases. It's hard to imagine putting data--any data--into a system where the tools to get it out haven't been written yet.
Yeah, it's a myth, but it's the myth that Sapir used as evidence of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My point wasn't about snow, or about words about snow, or about the correctness of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...it was about the fact that the original poster had Sapir's theory backwards and "language determines thought" does not mean the same thing as "thought determines language".
Slashdot Mirror
My otherwise useless cable modem provider, Charter, pointed this out to me when I signed up, so apparently they don't have a problem with my "stealing" cable.
Unfortunately, my wife never watched TV before I hooked it up to the cable, and now she's totally obsessed by Animal Planet.
and
11. A Boy and His Dog
12. 12 Monkeys
13. THX 1138
14. Waiting for the End of the World
Here's the perspective from twenty years down the road:
Of course you should go to college. That doesn't mean you should go to college right now.
College can teach you about a lot of useful things. It probably won't teach you how to be a system administrator, but believe me, as cool as a sysadmin gig sounds now, you won't want to do the same damn thing for the next forty to fifty years. Lack of education might not be a barrier to getting a job, but it can be a real barrier to advancing your career, which you will want to do sooner or later.
College can teach you skills that you can take to any job, and that you will need to have an enjoyable life--how to think, how to write, how to figure stuff out for yourself. If you live on campus, you will also learn social skills. You might also have the opportunity to study abroad, which is a lot of fun. Japan is really a geek paradise.
Having said that, I think a lot of people rush straight into college from high school. I did, and I regret it now. A lot of what you get out of school depends on the maturity that you bring with you, and you can grow up a lot working for a living full time. Also, if you save your money before college, you won't get into debt (which will give you more freedom later) and college will be more comfortable if you have money to spend. The girls will like you, Girls_don't_like_me, if you're old enough to buy alcohol and have the money to pay for it. You'll get better financial aid if you're supporting yourself, anyway.
In any case, it's probably too late to get into a good school this year if you're about to graduate. Take a year or two, put all the money you can in the bank, and apply to the best possible school you can.
Six months seems pretty tight to roll out a new programming team, even if they're all in the same room. How critical is this project? If you have "deep pockets" for it, despite budget cuts, it sounds important. If so, it's probably not a good candidate for a new, untested mode of operation.
I heard a little sound byte about this on WMUK (the Kalamazoo NPR station) and in an interview prior to the hearing one of the attendees--Fred Upton, I think--said something patently nonsensical...I think it was "the whole .kids domain will be protected by a firewall". It made it sound like Upton is in the pocket of the vendor who will, naturally, "provide the tools" "to protect our children", i.e., sell the government one more case of snake oil.
Courtney didn't do the math herself -- she copied Steve Albini's homework.
Please note that bad latency does not only affect gaming.
Citrix & other terminal services sessions also blow over high-latency connections.
So obviously one can't run a home business out of a small apartment
You can, but the part that you write off has to be dedicated to the business. You can't say that it's an office part of the time and something else the rest of the time.
If you run your own business, such as drumming up business for someone else, you can claim milage, gasoline, and a 1/4th of your living space expenses as a business expense.
You have to show that any business expenses that you write off are part of your business. Sure, you can say you took a loss, but you'll have a hard time convincing the IRS that every single mile that you drove was driven on the way to putting up signs. You also must show that any living space that you write off is used only for your business, i.e., you can't call your living room or kitchen a home office. Writing off home rent/utilities at home is one of the flags that may make the IRS look at your return very closely.
I learned this the hard way.
Dude, that was virtuosic. I'd mod you up if I hadn't posted already.
Wasn't it John W. Campbell that made all of the early advances with Campbellian Science Fiction?
Yeah, but Joseph Campbell is a different guy. He wrote Hero with a Thousand Faces which identified several plot elements (maybe 22 or 23, it's been a long time) that many epics (in the Western tradition) frequently use. The two that I can remember off the top of my head: there's something mysterious about the hero's father (he's a god, or Darth Vader, or whatever) and the hero initially refuses to go on the quest that he's called to do.
Campbell is more of an anthropologist than a literary critic, but a lot of writers were interested in his work. John Barth, for instance, wrote a lot about Cambell, and his novel Giles Goat Boy was a very self-conscious exploration (or if you insist, deconstruction) of Campbell's ideas.
Anyway, Star Wars was ripped off from Jack Kirby's New Gods comic, not Joseph Campbell.
Our planet is on a collision course with something that we, at our present state of knowledge, don't have a word for. A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object, so massive that no light can leave it. What I'm talking about is something like that, except that it isn't so much gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are soon to be sucked into the body of eternity. My model points to 11:18 am, Greenwich Mean Time, December 21, 2012 AD.
~Terence McKenna
Of course, McKenna was a (another) drugged-out nutcase, and (I believe) later decided he was wrong about a temporaral singularity, but it's (still) fun to make the connection.
And LaTeX has been in use since 1986 IIRC. The current version (LaTeX2e) dates from 1994. I'm not sure the first PowerPC was commercialised at that time. [...snip...] If you have some name of program used before LaTeX and still in use, could you name them for us? Thank you!
Pagemaker was introduced for the 68k (pre-PPC) Mac in 1985.
1. You should do what makes you happy. The whole point of a job is to have the money that lets you do the things you really want to do. Pursuing a career for any other reason is climbing onto a treadmill that you may never leave.
2. It's would be bad not to change majors if your interests change. Twenty years later, the thought of being locked into decisions I made as an 18-year-old gives me the chills. It's easy to believe now that you know exactly what you want from life, but believe me, you don't. Learn the things that will serve you whatever you do--how to write, how to think, how to appreciate good things like art and music, and how to pick up women. This is your best change to learn that stuff.
3. Anyway, employers care about more than your technical training. Fair or not, the name of your school means a lot, no matter what you did there. Do you come off as an asshole in an interview? This will almost always overshadow your technical qualifications. Really, liberal arts classes where you spend a lot of time talking with non-geeks can help with this (although it's not a magic bullet, and you don't need to major in a humanities area to benefit from this experience.)
4. The world is full of developers who don't really understand their problem domain. Computers are pervasive everywhere, and there are always opportunitites to develop in areas that interest you. I think it's probably true that there aren't enough programmers that understand the subtleties of the problem that they're trying to solve outside the subtleties of the code.
I've read the book. I've gotten through some pretty dry stuff just for pleasure, but I have to say I really don't think the book is so much "beautifully written" as "beautifully researched" or "closely footnoted". It looks like Infinite Jest on the page, but it sure doesn't read that way.
I'm sure there are people who like this kind of writing--maybe the same people who think Ken Burns understands jazz--but to me it comes off a little too dispassionate for what is basically a human interest story.
Right. What I meant, which wasn't clear from my post, was "unless you're a small enough business that you make all of the decisions about everything yourself." I wholeheartedly agree that a business specialist, such as a lawyer, should make this decision rather than a technical specialist, but that specialist might not be the CEO.
Unless you're running your whole business, you shouldn't be making policy about document archiving--you should be implementing it. It's true that there might be technical issues (such as "how do we preseve (or destroy) documents on laptops in remote offices") but it's totally ass-backwards to make business decisions on these issues.
I think that different branches of the government have different hiring priorities, and it's hard to generalize about "the government" as a single institution.
I don't have any military background, as either a contractor or soldier, but I believe the posts about the military preferring experience over domain-specific training. However, I do have experience with civil administration (more than I should have, really) and my experience has been that education is very highly valued. I expect that most of the PhD's in Philosophy who aren't teaching or flipping burgers work for the government. I've certainly heard that the State Department is that way...the great salt lick of social science PhD's who don't go on to teach.
Having said that, I'll go ahead and generalize about the government vs. the private sector--there's a huge difference in views on equal opportunity. I not-to-recently moved in the opposite direction--from government & education to the private sector--and it sure looks like all white folks all the time to me. When I point this out to management, they give me a very thinly veiled "but they'll steal the office supplies!" speech, and insist that they need to go check their voice mail. Maybe it's just the particular company I work for, or the Midwest, but it feels like there are very different ideas about EOE.
Stallman: Someone I know was unable to apply for a job because resumes had to be Word files. Even governments sometimes impose Word format on the public, which is truly outrageous.
It's a stupid requirement, sure, but would you hire someone who can't (or won't) problem-solve? Apart from the obvious technical solutions, you could go to Kinko's, or ask a friend, or whatever. If this is a showstopper for a job applicant, they're either an idiot or a prima donna.Neither one makes a very good employee.
I think a lot of HAL's voice interface was just a dramatic device to make it really, really clear that something was going wrong with the computer. It would have been an even more boring movie if Dave and Gary sat around talking about the erratic performance of the expert system software. Similarly, it would have been far less dramatic if, when Dave is locked out, he simply said to himself, "I guess there's a serious bug in the computer" and disassembles a prop that isn't talking back.
It's true that HAL became the most interesting character in the movie, but I think that was really unintentional. If you take away the dramatic device, the whole point of HAL is that he doesn't understand the value of life and doesn't think at all like a human, even if he sounds like one. He totally fails the Turing test.
I spent a lot of time last year looking for open source accounting software. I'm not happy about it, but I would not recommend open source enterprise accounting to anyone who wants to keep their job/business.
Cost: Yes, commercial accounting systems are incredibly expensive. Unfortunately, fucking up your financials is far, far more expensive than investing money in good, supported software. Call a few lawyers and accountings who do auditing and ask for quotes on hourly rates if you're not sure. Bad accounting will ruin a business very, very quickly.
Reliability: I believe in the basic cathedral/bazaar theory, but there just aren't enough people writing and using open source enterprise accounting packages for the theory to apply. Unless there are tens of thousands of users, I have to assume that there are bugs in the system and I don't know where they are. See costs, above.
Personnel: if I need to hire someone from a temp agency to sit at a workstation and do AR for a few days, I don't want to spend half the time I'm paying an outrageous fee training them on an obscure system or how to use their damn operating system. If I need to have someone set up the system (as I am not an accountant), and pay truly outrageous amounts for their time, I sure don't want to spend thousands of dollars getting them familiarized with the system. Especially when they will still be punting on decisions that can affect the system years later.
Everything that I've said isn't true if there's an open source solution that becomes widely used...but accounting is really the last area of your business where you want to be on the bleeding edge of software development. In other areas, the bleeding edge might give you a competitive advantage, but in accounting, you will just plain bleed.
...and I decided to do something else (mostly writing) rather than grow to hate one of the few things that I was good at and enjoyed.
It was a terrible, terrible mistake.
I always hacked around in my spare time, and eventually pulled myself out of semi-poverty writing CGIs for "web developers" (Thanks, Mr. Wall!) but when I started doing programming full-time I realized that a.) I would never get tired of it, and b.) I was ten years behind.
Believe me, you'll get sick of the stuff that you do instead of programming a lot sooner that you get sick of writing code. I would quit jobs every few years, but I have never really considered a career change since I came home to the great silicon salt lick. I may hate the company I work for, but I never get tired of my work.
Working at other kinds of jobs taught some very valuable things that I couldn't have learned from geeks--how to write, how to manage people, and how to seduce women. Still, every day I wish I had started five years earlier.
I believe in my heart that one day Lord of Light will be recognized outside of the science fiction ghetto. When Zelazny was on, he was as inventive a stylist as any of his "literary" contemporaries.
Phillip K Dick was original in every way. I still read Ubik every few years, and it still fucks me up. I think his work is incredibly influential on pop (i.e., TV and movie) science fiction. The Matrix is pure PKD. I think he really writes about the uncertainties of his era in a way no one else did, and wrote about drugs in a way that nobody but Burroughs (whom I don't really like) could, and that's the kind of thing that folks 50+ years hence will get from him.
I really like Neal Stephanson, too, but I can't really call him inventive, as almost everything he does is lifted straight from V era Thomas Pynchon.
I've been properly brainwashed in the Open Source way, and I use XML all the time as an interchange mechanism, but you'll have to pry Crystal Reports from my cold, dead fingers.
I have spent a lot of time training non-technical users to get their own damn reports from databases. It's hard to imagine putting data--any data--into a system where the tools to get it out haven't been written yet.
Yeah, it's a myth, but it's the myth that Sapir used as evidence of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. My point wasn't about snow, or about words about snow, or about the correctness of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...it was about the fact that the original poster had Sapir's theory backwards and "language determines thought" does not mean the same thing as "thought determines language".