Um, I don't get it. I go to this site and get Firefox complaining I need plugins. And then not finding any to install. I'm not enough of a L337 sp0rtz dw33b to already know what you are talking about. Google only tells me about all the wonderful content supposedly on this website (which I presume is for pay.) Please explain.
It was amusing to watch the various combinations of orkut community recommendations. Back when I had nothing better to do than troll orkut all day, I would attempt guesses at how particular recommendations were selected. I can't recall any specific ones, but I was always amused when some random technical subject would be associated with a Bay Area social group. Which, of course, mirrors life with a population that is far smaller and more incestuous than it appears to the outside observer.
Yes, hard problems take time and "errands" are annoying. But if you don't have time to bathe or do laundry, your advisor will never let you in the building to defend your masterpiece because nobody wants to be in the same room with you.
There is a limit to how far you can go before "genius" becomes "freak."
This is why I don't use the mailbox out front except for a very small number of things that I'm forced to by local government agencies.
I pay $16 a month and have to pick up my mail several blocks away, but it keeps it from being stolen or scatterd all over the street when somebody pulls the mailbox off the wall yet again. I own a rather nice shredder, too. You'll never guess what also happens to the garbage...
Like this bunch has enough patience to stick out even one of those kiddie plastic canvas projects. 700+ hours of hand stitching over five months. And the guy didn't even do it himself, that I would be impressed about it. He got his Mom to do it.
I have to suppress the urge to throttle people when co-workers think they are being cute with "Nice hat you got there, would be swell to have a new sweater. By the way, I wear a size Large." They complain about paying $25 for something at Wart-Maul but think I'll be thrilled at the suggestion I take six months to spin and knit a one-of-a-kind custom garment for them?
No, that would be the quarter-height rack I saved from the PDP-11 disk drive: coffee table, step ladder, industrial-strength dolly and Much Much More! With Ground Cable! When I moved out west, I finally gave it to a musician friend for his recording equipment.
The Indy is actually pretty small, a little bigger than a Sun pizza box.
Oh, yes. Particularly if we turn the display on. It has an external drive in a mini-tower case, too.
Now that we've recently added the Quicksilver G4 space heater, we haven't had to turn on the Indy space heater yet this winter. And it has to get bad before we think about the SPARCstation IPX space heaters. I think we are more likely to leave the Sony huge-ass check monitor space heater on longer first.
I know quite well what a Challenge is. I'm not sure it is physically possible to get an XL in this apartment, much less find a place to put it. I'm very certain it would blow any circuit in this building by itself. We live in the basement of an old house in downtown San Francisco. Small rooms, low ceiling.
There's a large steel shelf "rack" with a bunch of stuff. Normally only about half of it is running, a few machines either way and you can really tell.
Although lately I've been using the Harvest Gold space heater in the other room. "Mmm! Baked potatoes again, My Favorite!"
Unpaid internships, if the intern does anything remotely productive and is a net gain for the organization, is quite illegal. And also rather common.
The trouble with enforcement is that it is the "intern" who must file the complaint with the Department of Labor. Only the person exploited can do it, nobody else can. And when you are working for nothing, what you are really working for is a good reference, so you will not do anything that will remotely piss off your "employer".
A while back I tried to report multiple obvious and blatant "internships" that were advertised as requiring professional level experience. Neither the Federal Wage and Hours department nor the similar organization for the state of California will do anything about it. At least California was decent enough to talk to me about it, they politely said they have bigger fish to fry and few resources for enforcement. As for the Feds, I couldn't even get them to answer the door at what was advertised as their western regional office.
That depends mostly on the laws of the other country. The US requires a naturalized citizen to renounce the former country but it's not always the other way if you start as a US citizen.
And the reports are that it's extremely difficult to get the State Department to accept that you wish to renounce your US citizenship anyway.
I would suggest the reason you aren't getting people with low-level skills is that everybody who had them had no choice but to move on. Embedded has been taking anybody who has C and hardware experience but without that background there hasn't been much. I know lots of people who used to be do that stuff and are now all slinging J2EE because it's better than.NET. Well, not all of them. Some are doing construction. Or unloading trucks.
I like low-level stuff. But nobody has been interested in hiring anything of the sort except for a very few of the highest of the high-end kernel hackers. So now that there are positions to fill finally, people have moved on. Or given up and moved to a hut in southeast Asia. (Yes. Really.)
This is the direct result of widespread industry hiring practices where clueless managers only look at the number of matching acronyms on the optically-scanned resume. People who have good skills vanish because there is absolutely no attempt at professional development. Only calling up one's headhunter to see which set of urgently critical buzzwords she can drum up this time. I've watched it go on for years, and it alienates good technical people who aren't interested in chasing twelve new technical fads a month.
For your specific case, your location is hurting you. Utah may "manufacture scenery" as a friend puts it, but culturally it's not attractive to many geeks. And a lot of the kinds of people you would want are old-school geeks. I had a connection through the SLC airport recently and the first thing I thought of even just sitting there for an hour was that I wouldn't fit in. I want the multi-cultural progressive kind of environment where I can interact with people different from me -- learn their history, eat their food and make feeble attempts at learning their languages. This is not at all what Utah looks like from the outside.
Most of the tech people I know who would be happy in a family-friendly kind of place aren't much interested in digging into the guts of computers for fun. It's a job, and as soon as they leave the office they are going to forget all about whatever Visual Basic thing they were working on and go home and play ball with the kids.
If that is your only answer, I'd love to see how you are going to live in Redwood City on $7 an hour. That $7 an hour, full time, without subtracting taxes or anything, is not even enough for a median one bedroom apartment. "Sorry kid, no ramen for you this month."
Important points to note:
Median income, two person household (2001): $64,100
Average rent for one bedroom apartment: $1415
Average rent for two bedroom apartment: $1764
Median sales price for single family home: $590.000
Average sales price for single family home: $792,735
Housing wage (full time to afford average two bedroom apartment): $33.60
Average wait for Section 8 voucher (subsidized low-income housing): one year.
Oh, wait, San Mateo is too expensive? How about this?
I'm familiar with the difference between Caller ID and ANI. A VoIP system may not be able to stuff in whatever ANI it likes but it sure can fail to provide anything in the first place. So it likely won't be used for spoofing, exactly. But the guy making prank calls to 911 probably doesn't care.
Yes, anything that could really spoof ANI is positively frightening. But just being able to fail to provide it opens up a lot of room for abuse right there.
Maybe that explains why the fire department showed up here the other night. "We" apparently called and reported a fire. Dispatch then said it came from an "invalid" phone number.
Bastards wasted the time of more than a dozen firefighters and several trucks on a prank. And it wasn't even a good prank. I hope their houses weren't on fire that evening...
Really, now. I'm one of those "Pinko Liberal Commie Environmentalists" (if you believe the far Right's opinion of my public transit and recycling "personal virtues") and I'm sick of sensationalist claptrap.
Ok, we are using natural resources. Lots of natural resources. Yes, this is a problem. Although the usual Satan in this, the United States, is about the same as their previous report and now the new bad guys are China and India. And the US isn't even the worst, we are behind UAE's air conditioners.
So when are they planning to release a report in Hindi? What I want to know in their sensationalist press release, is what are they doing about it? If the goal is to attract donations to further their work, I'd like to hear more about it than "Ooooo! Evil Selfish People Ruin The Environment!!"
So there are huge changes since 1961, or 1972 or even the 8% increase since 1991. We know the Bad Old Days were, um, Bad. That's why many people are trying to make changes. But how have we been doing since? What are the current trends?
>Florida was the only state out of fifty that had
>serious problems with the election.
No, it was just one of the ones where the margin was small enough that making a big stink about it might just change the results. There were recounts elsewhere, and in other races, too, but Florida got most of the press.
There were plenty of problems, there always have been. But nobody pays attention to them most of the time because they are not believed to be enough to affect the outcome.
Yes, there is quite a lot of dissent. And I expect there are fingers typing madly as we speak, because the mailing list suddenly got slower and now I haven't gotten anything in a while.
There has been no change on the EFF web site, although I don't know if it has gone to their announcements list. I know I haven't gotten anything and I am on their newsletter list.
>Is the marketplace really going to pull the
>same thing, where a capable worker with an eye
>for simplest-route problem solving will be passed >over in favor of one
>who can spout the right bullshit while ignoring
>the fact that they're playing at busy-work?
Umm, yes? HR and hiring managers act like they assume that half of your resume is complete crap. I have been told so many times that my resume would look spectacular if I would just put some more buzzwords on it so it would "jump out at people".
If I am looking for a unix development position, why is it necessary that I pad my resume with crap like "knows how to work Microsoft Office"? Or list every single operating system I have ever used? (I suppose then I'm being misleading when I leave out cpm, z, tandy-dos or my extensive experience with Pet Basic?)
Actual technical folks can sort out the real deal from the TLA-happy moron. But if you never get past the clueless management screen, it doesn't make any difference.
Re:This machine already exists...
on
Books on Demand
·
· Score: 1
Yes, and it's been around a while, too...
Of course, something that could actually do a decent binding job would be nice. "Perfect" is nothing of the sort. I'd take comb over that most of the time, and any idiot can give Kinkos a few bucks and get it in minutes. One of the reasons I often buy copies of things freely available, because I want it to last through more than two readings.
Oh, and if you think professional perfect bind sucks, you should try those do-it-yourself machines...
There are jobs to be had, but they are mostly not really near residential areas. Yes, the closest major residential areas to the Webvan facility are full of yuppies with rich kids, but they are miles away. The new mall that some developer built in a former pine forest is having the same problem. Of the local folks, as soon as they turn 18, they are working construction or at the chicken plant. And there aren't that many teenage newspaper delivery folks anymore, either, it has been taken over by adults who drive their now longer routes.
From what I have seen around here, teens work at the local grocery or fast food place, but don't travel far. And even then they are often competing with adults for the same jobs. Those adults are motivated to travel further and longer, particularly if the job is transit-accessible. I have seen people drive an hour to work the night shift at a gas station, or two hours by transit to a grocery store.
Teenagers, or at least the live at home variety, seem to be a minor part of the job market here. The largest pool of low-wage workers by far are adults, or at least older teens, trying to support themselves or their families. They have a strong incentive to travel further and longer for even a bad job (which is probably not looking for part-time workers, anyway.)
>As an added bonus, at least where I live, I get >to say I went to Harris Teeter. And I really like >saying "Teeter"
You must not live in Atlanta, then. I would like to know what is going to happen to the big gaping unfinished now-owned-by-Kroger hole in the new shopping center across from my office...
Slashdot Mirror
Um, I don't get it. I go to this site and get Firefox complaining I need plugins. And then not finding any to install. I'm not enough of a L337 sp0rtz dw33b to already know what you are talking about. Google only tells me about all the wonderful content supposedly on this website (which I presume is for pay.) Please explain.
... your data were routed through West Elbonia, now wouldn't it?"
How is this different from paying off the guys with the baseball bats? Or having to hire a "fixer" to get your building permit?
And just how would they be able to "enforce" anything? I see a RICO lawsuit headed their way...
It was amusing to watch the various combinations of orkut community recommendations. Back when I had nothing better to do than troll orkut all day, I would attempt guesses at how particular recommendations were selected. I can't recall any specific ones, but I was always amused when some random technical subject would be associated with a Bay Area social group. Which, of course, mirrors life with a population that is far smaller and more incestuous than it appears to the outside observer.
like family and friends.
Yes, hard problems take time and "errands" are annoying. But if you don't have time to bathe or do laundry, your advisor will never let you in the building to defend your masterpiece because nobody wants to be in the same room with you.
There is a limit to how far you can go before "genius" becomes "freak."
This is why I don't use the mailbox out front except for a very small number of things that I'm forced to by local government agencies.
I pay $16 a month and have to pick up my mail several blocks away, but it keeps it from being stolen or scatterd all over the street when somebody pulls the mailbox off the wall yet again. I own a rather nice shredder, too. You'll never guess what also happens to the garbage...
Like this bunch has enough patience to stick out even one of those kiddie plastic canvas projects. 700+ hours of hand stitching over five months. And the guy didn't even do it himself, that I would be impressed about it. He got his Mom to do it.
I have to suppress the urge to throttle people when co-workers think they are being cute with "Nice hat you got there, would be swell to have a new sweater. By the way, I wear a size Large." They complain about paying $25 for something at Wart-Maul but think I'll be thrilled at the suggestion I take six months to spin and knit a one-of-a-kind custom garment for them?
No, that would be the quarter-height rack I saved from the PDP-11 disk drive: coffee table, step ladder, industrial-strength dolly and Much Much More! With Ground Cable! When I moved out west, I finally gave it to a musician friend for his recording equipment.
The Indy is actually pretty small, a little bigger than a Sun pizza box.
Oh, yes. Particularly if we turn the display on. It has an external drive in a mini-tower case, too.
Now that we've recently added the Quicksilver G4 space heater, we haven't had to turn on the Indy space heater yet this winter. And it has to get bad before we think about the SPARCstation IPX space heaters. I think we are more likely to leave the Sony huge-ass check monitor space heater on longer first.
I know quite well what a Challenge is. I'm not sure it is physically possible to get an XL in this apartment, much less find a place to put it. I'm very certain it would blow any circuit in this building by itself. We live in the basement of an old house in downtown San Francisco. Small rooms, low ceiling.
There's a large steel shelf "rack" with a bunch of stuff. Normally only about half of it is running, a few machines either way and you can really tell.
Although lately I've been using the Harvest Gold space heater in the other room. "Mmm! Baked potatoes again, My Favorite!"
We mostly use our Indy as a space heater...
Unpaid internships, if the intern does anything remotely productive and is a net gain for the organization, is quite illegal. And also rather common.
The trouble with enforcement is that it is the "intern" who must file the complaint with the Department of Labor. Only the person exploited can do it, nobody else can. And when you are working for nothing, what you are really working for is a good reference, so you will not do anything that will remotely piss off your "employer".
A while back I tried to report multiple obvious and blatant "internships" that were advertised as requiring professional level experience. Neither the Federal Wage and Hours department nor the similar organization for the state of California will do anything about it. At least California was decent enough to talk to me about it, they politely said they have bigger fish to fry and few resources for enforcement. As for the Feds, I couldn't even get them to answer the door at what was advertised as their western regional office.
That depends mostly on the laws of the other country. The US requires a naturalized citizen to renounce the former country but it's not always the other way if you start as a US citizen.
And the reports are that it's extremely difficult to get the State Department to accept that you wish to renounce your US citizenship anyway.
I would suggest the reason you aren't getting people with low-level skills is that everybody who had them had no choice but to move on. Embedded has been taking anybody who has C and hardware experience but without that background there hasn't been much. I know lots of people who used to be do that stuff and are now all slinging J2EE because it's better than .NET. Well, not all of them. Some are doing construction. Or unloading trucks.
I like low-level stuff. But nobody has been interested in hiring anything of the sort except for a very few of the highest of the high-end kernel hackers. So now that there are positions to fill finally, people have moved on. Or given up and moved to a hut in southeast Asia. (Yes. Really.)
This is the direct result of widespread industry hiring practices where clueless managers only look at the number of matching acronyms on the optically-scanned resume. People who have good skills vanish because there is absolutely no attempt at professional development. Only calling up one's headhunter to see which set of urgently critical buzzwords she can drum up this time. I've watched it go on for years, and it alienates good technical people who aren't interested in chasing twelve new technical fads a month.
For your specific case, your location is hurting you. Utah may "manufacture scenery" as a friend puts it, but culturally it's not attractive to many geeks. And a lot of the kinds of people you would want are old-school geeks. I had a connection through the SLC airport recently and the first thing I thought of even just sitting there for an hour was that I wouldn't fit in. I want the multi-cultural progressive kind of environment where I can interact with people different from me -- learn their history, eat their food and make feeble attempts at learning their languages. This is not at all what Utah looks like from the outside.
Most of the tech people I know who would be happy in a family-friendly kind of place aren't much interested in digging into the guts of computers for fun. It's a job, and as soon as they leave the office they are going to forget all about whatever Visual Basic thing they were working on and go home and play ball with the kids.
You are a troll. But I will respond anyway.
If that is your only answer, I'd love to see how you are going to live in Redwood City on $7 an hour. That $7 an hour, full time, without subtracting taxes or anything, is not even enough for a median one bedroom apartment. "Sorry kid, no ramen for you this month."
Before you claim I'm full of shit, here are some numbers:
San Mateo County, California general information
San Mateo County housing statistics
Important points to note:
Median income, two person household (2001): $64,100
Average rent for one bedroom apartment: $1415
Average rent for two bedroom apartment: $1764
Median sales price for single family home: $590.000
Average sales price for single family home: $792,735
Housing wage (full time to afford average two bedroom apartment): $33.60
Average wait for Section 8 voucher (subsidized low-income housing): one year.
Oh, wait, San Mateo is too expensive? How about this?
Santa Clara CountyOr these?
Bay Area Housing AffordabilityI'm familiar with the difference between Caller ID and ANI. A VoIP system may not be able to stuff in whatever ANI it likes but it sure can fail to provide anything in the first place. So it likely won't be used for spoofing, exactly. But the guy making prank calls to 911 probably doesn't care.
Yes, anything that could really spoof ANI is positively frightening. But just being able to fail to provide it opens up a lot of room for abuse right there.
Maybe that explains why the fire department showed up here the other night. "We" apparently called and reported a fire. Dispatch then said it came from an "invalid" phone number.
Bastards wasted the time of more than a dozen firefighters and several trucks on a prank. And it wasn't even a good prank. I hope their houses weren't on fire that evening...
Really, now. I'm one of those "Pinko Liberal Commie Environmentalists" (if you believe the far Right's opinion of my public transit and recycling "personal virtues") and I'm sick of sensationalist claptrap.
Ok, we are using natural resources. Lots of natural resources. Yes, this is a problem. Although the usual Satan in this, the United States, is about the same as their previous report and now the new bad guys are China and India. And the US isn't even the worst, we are behind UAE's air conditioners.
So when are they planning to release a report in Hindi? What I want to know in their sensationalist press release, is what are they doing about it? If the goal is to attract donations to further their work, I'd like to hear more about it than "Ooooo! Evil Selfish People Ruin The Environment!!"
So there are huge changes since 1961, or 1972 or even the 8% increase since 1991. We know the Bad Old Days were, um, Bad. That's why many people are trying to make changes. But how have we been doing since? What are the current trends?
So now it's time for all the Dvorak typists to feel superior? Oh, right, we already do! :)
It's not exactly "security" but it does keep people from casually using my machine...
>Florida was the only state out of fifty that had
>serious problems with the election.
No, it was just one of the ones where the margin was small enough that making a big stink about it might just change the results. There were recounts elsewhere, and in other races, too, but Florida got most of the press.
There were plenty of problems, there always have been. But nobody pays attention to them most of the time because they are not believed to be enough to affect the outcome.
>In the case where the cops are involved,
>you'll get it back legally.
Yes, but only after the case is closed. When he does finally get out of the evidence locker, he can donate it to a museum.
Yes, there is quite a lot of dissent. And I expect there are fingers typing madly as we speak, because the mailing list suddenly got slower and now I haven't gotten anything in a while.
There has been no change on the EFF web site, although I don't know if it has gone to their announcements list. I know I haven't gotten anything and I am on their newsletter list.
Yes, and the president of the company was also in Vegas, and was *not* arrested. He is in SF right now, trying to deal with this disaster.
He even said that he would much more easily believe that it would be him, rather than one of his programmers.
>Is the marketplace really going to pull the
>same thing, where a capable worker with an eye
>for simplest-route problem solving will be passed >over in favor of one
>who can spout the right bullshit while ignoring
>the fact that they're playing at busy-work?
Umm, yes? HR and hiring managers act like they assume that half of your resume is complete crap. I have been told so many times that my resume would look spectacular if I would just put some more buzzwords on it so it would "jump out at people".
If I am looking for a unix development position, why is it necessary that I pad my resume with crap like "knows how to work Microsoft Office"? Or list every single operating system I have ever used? (I suppose then I'm being misleading when I leave out cpm, z, tandy-dos or my extensive experience with Pet Basic?)
Actual technical folks can sort out the real deal from the TLA-happy moron. But if you never get past the clueless management screen, it doesn't make any difference.
Yes, and it's been around a while, too...
Of course, something that could actually do a decent binding job would be nice. "Perfect" is nothing of the sort. I'd take comb over that most of the time, and any idiot can give Kinkos a few bucks and get it in minutes. One of the reasons I often buy copies of things freely available, because I want it to last through more than two readings.
Oh, and if you think professional perfect bind sucks, you should try those do-it-yourself machines...
There are jobs to be had, but they are mostly not really near residential areas. Yes, the closest major residential areas to the Webvan facility are full of yuppies with rich kids, but they are miles away. The new mall that some developer built in a former pine forest is having the same problem. Of the local folks, as soon as they turn 18, they are working construction or at the chicken plant. And there aren't that many teenage newspaper delivery folks anymore, either, it has been taken over by adults who drive their now longer routes.
From what I have seen around here, teens work at the local grocery or fast food place, but don't travel far. And even then they are often competing with adults for the same jobs. Those adults are motivated to travel further and longer, particularly if the job is transit-accessible. I have seen people drive an hour to work the night shift at a gas station, or two hours by transit to a grocery store.
Teenagers, or at least the live at home variety, seem to be a minor part of the job market here. The largest pool of low-wage workers by far are adults, or at least older teens, trying to support themselves or their families. They have a strong incentive to travel further and longer for even a bad job (which is probably not looking for part-time workers, anyway.)
>As an added bonus, at least where I live, I get >to say I went to Harris Teeter. And I really like >saying "Teeter"
You must not live in Atlanta, then. I would like to know what is going to happen to the big gaping unfinished now-owned-by-Kroger hole in the new shopping center across from my office...