I'm guessing just about enough money to fight the war in Iraq for 5 minutes. Auditing and recoding government websites will probably cost several million dollars, but that's peanuts compared to most government spending, and it's more than worth it to make sure disabled people have access to the government they help pay for.
Sun had everything but a halfway competent management team that knew how to make money. Oracle, on the other hand, has a fantastic management team that specializes in making truckloads of money. You can have all the cool tech in the world, but if you can't make money with it you're doomed.
I agree with this, the only caveat being to do your homework first to make sure your CC classes transfer. Here in Texas, most of the universities and community colleges have long lists of courses that will transfer, so you can pretty much take your first two years at any community college and transfer without issue to most universities in the state. I've also been in states where this wasn't the case, though, or it only applied to certain colleges and universities, so you need to be careful so you don't waste your time on courses that don't transfer. And never go to one of the for-profit colleges like DeVry and expect anything to transfer.
Here in Austin I was able to take all of my core classes at Austin Community College, which is a great institution with lots of campuses and tons of evening, weekend, and online course offerings. It's also dirt cheap compared to any 4-year institution I've ever seen. Then, I could transfer to Texas State and take all of my classes in the evenings at their Round Rock location. All of this ended up being far cheaper in aggregate than any of those online-only colleges and my degree comes from an accredited university (albeit not exactly one on the top tier or anything) that doesn't get weird looks when people see it on a resume.
Face it: even if it is possible to get a decent education at an online university, the stigma against them in most industries is so huge that your resume is likely to get passed over if your degree is from one of them anyway. With many traditional universities and community colleges these days taking steps to cater to non-traditional students, it makes less and less sense to resort to an online university for your education. You don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars and end up with a degree that people will believe came from a diploma mill.
This reminds me of something that really bugged me about this story on CNN. When CNN reported basically this same story yesterday, the link from their front page read "Former SNL Alum talks Net Neutrality" or something like that. Then you click, and it turns out they're talking about Senator Franken. It struck me as really disrespectful to refer to him that way. It would be like referring to the governor of California as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger" or our 40th president as "Former Actor Reagan".
Yes, Franken started out as a comedian, but he's now an elected United States Senator and should be afforded the same respect as any other Senator. Of course, the amount of respect we give to our senators tends to be vanishingly small (in most cases deservedly so), but we at least give them the dignity of referring to them by their proper title.
I'm probably overreacting, but I was surprised to see a supposedly serious news organization do something like that.
It figures he would make them into slides. Now all he needs to do is invite his extended family over to his house on false pretenses and subject them to an interminably long slide show. Brings back horrible, horrible memories.
People don't make career choices based on their passions because people have to eat. Sure it would be great if we could all follow our passions, but in practice the only people who can do that either have a passion for something that happens to pay really well or have giant trust funds from their rich parents. The rest of us have to go into whatever seems the least soul-crushing that will still pay the bills.
Your passion was software engineering which lucky for you happens to pay a lot. If your passion was playing the guitar or surfing, or even social work or teaching, your chances of making enough money to feed yourself, much less raise a family, following your dreams would be far lower.
It's also worth noting that passions change over time. Growing up my passion was computers, and it just so happened that I entered the work force right when the Internet was starting to take off so my passion was something I could get paid a lot of money to do. Now, though, while I still enjoy working with computers I wouldn't say I'm particularly passionate about it. I have other things I like to do, but none of them are going to pay the mortgage, so I keep working with computers.
I hear people say everyone should follow their dreams and I just want to smack them. Yes, spend some time in your early 20s following your dreams and seeing if you can make them work, but always have a backup plan. If you want to study music or underwater basket-weaving or whatever you love to do, fine, knock yourself out...but make sure you double major in something with more stable job prospects even if it doesn't get your heart racing thinking about doing it for the rest of your life. Then, if your passions don't end up being enough to live on you can go to your job that you're not passionate about all day and then go do whatever you're passionate about on the weekends like most people do.
Even if it's still technically beer, it isn't going to taste anything like beer. At beer's usually low alcohol content there are lots of subtle flavors that would get completely overwhelmed by the alcohol taste at 110 proof. You might as well just drink grain alcohol, it will probably taste about the same.
I always thought Playboy's target audience was housewives who want to look progressive by buying it for their husbands, and their 12-14 year old sons who steal it from the mailbox every month. I don't know where this "24-34 year old men" nonsense is coming from.
The problem with recruiting via the justice system, meaning recruiting black hats who get caught, is that you're hiring from a pool with demonstrated ethical issues. Sure, their technical skills may be top notch, but hiring someone who has already shown they're willing to circumvent legal and ethical boundaries just to satisfy their own curiosity is asking for trouble.
Anyone else a little weirded out by the WSJ image of Jeff Bezos trying to show you 1880s porn on his Kindle?
Yes, if you were able to see the whole picture you could very clearly see that the woman is showing her ankle in a highly provocative manner. Why, I've heard rumors of people using similar devices to show pictures of women posing completely hatless. It's absolutely shameful that this new "electronic book displaying contraption" is being used for such filth.
The problem is that most 20 year old kids don't really know how sensitive they are to things like this until they're repeatedly exposed to them, by which point much of the damage has already been done. Luckily for me, I was exposed to the Internet and all of the nastiness on it when I was only 13, and I've managed to get by with no ill effects at all except for the occasional extended blackout followed by a dead hooker in my bed. Some more sensitive people might really lose their minds, though.
I actually started watching the series during the last season of Tennant, so have been spending the last several weeks catching up on Eccleston and the parts of Tennant that I missed, so I've fallen behind a bit on the Smith series. Oops.
Smith took a little getting used to, but I have learned to like him. Eccleston and Tennant were very good as well. Honestly, since the show came back there hasn't been a bad or even mediocre doctor. I'm really not sold on Amy Pond yet though. She's pretty to look at, but I'm not sure I like the character. Also, the way they got rid of her fiancee seemed unnecessarily random and sudden like they've been trying to get rid of him the moment he was introduced (which they probably were). Maybe I was just spoiled with Donna and Rose who were both excellent characters with reasonably well-fleshed-out backstories.
I would hate to see Smith pull an Eccleston and leave right when he was really starting to make the character his own, though. It amazes me how people can come in saying playing the Doctor was their biggest dream in life (as Smith did) and then drop it so quickly.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said buzzwords. I meant the right technical stuff like "Linux", "PHP", stuff like that. If they have stuff like "creating corporate synergies" then they should indeed be shot.
If they have the right buzzwords on their resume, bring them in and ask them technical questions relevant to your environment. Then, throw in a few questions related to other technologies on their resume that aren't directly relevant to your environment just to see if they're the type of person who likes to puff up their resume by listing stuff they don't really know. You have to have at least a passing knowledge of the stuff you ask about, of course.
After you've established a baseline technical competency, ask them to solve a few simple programming problems to measure their problem solving ability. Doing them in PHP or Perl is obviously a bonus since you're dealing with LAMP, but pseudocode should be fine in a live interview type of situation. Don't judge things like missed semicolons too harshly, they're probably nervous. Concoct some basic scenarios dealing with the L or A part of the LAMP stack to judge their troubleshooting ability. Ask them for some SQL statements to pull certain data from a hypothetical database for the M part.
Interspersed throughout should be questions that judge how well they'll fit into your company culture and how easily they can learn new things or deal with new and unexpected situations. For these, concentrate on asking about past experiences of that type rather than asking canned hypotheticals that everyone has already seen on the Internet and knows how to answer.
A person's technical competence is not a reliable predictor of success. It's part of the equation, but his or her ability to learn and grow with the company, as well as the ability to fit in with your company culture, is much more important unless you're just looking for temporary contract labor.
Also, don't be afraid to ask your friendly neighborhood PHB. If he's taken any sort of business classes at all, and didn't spend the entire time Facebooking instead of paying attention, he should have plenty of insight on effective hiring.
Slashdot is just taking from the standard journalist's playbook: If you can tie a story to something that's currently very popular, especially Facebook or Twitter, you can get 10 times the page hits you would have normally gotten. If you can tie those things into a story that will generate lots of hits all on its own anyway, such as one dealing with sexual violence against children, your story might even go viral and you can just sit back and watch the ad revenue roll in.
I probably should have omitted the last four words, since they aren't really part of the quote. Other than that, blame any difficulties in comprehension on Mr. Shakespeare.
The line you refer to was in Henry VI, and it was said during a comedic scene. Two characters are talking about what a utopia they would make England if they were in charge, with increasingly more absurd propositions like selling seven half-penny loaves for a penny, and making it a felony to drink "small" beer. This culminated in one of the characters saying "the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" as a sort of first step toward their imagined utopia. It was a laugh line, and one that probably resulted in uproarious laughter among the audience of the day. The line was immediately followed by this one:
Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.- How now! who's there?
Clearly, Shakespeare had no love for lawyers or legal proceedings, and it's fair to say his audience probably didn't either. Some lawyers have tried to frame this as actually complimentary to lawyers, arguing that Shakespeare framed the men who were having this conversation as villains, but I think that's looking too deeply into it. Shakespeare wrote for his audience, and that whole scene was obviously intended primarily as comic relief. Throwing in a lawyer joke was an easy way to get laughs then just as it is now. The line about a single sealed (signed) document making one not his own man any more is the sort of biting social commentary Shakespeare often slipped into his comedies.
Exactly. Any data center engineers running into issues with the cost of power and cooling (ie, all of them) should be exploring both of these options. Whatever solutions we come up with, be they efficient machines or renewable on-site energy or both, are destined to become inadequate at some point as our computing needs inevitably expand to fill the available capacity. The more additive solutions we can pile on, the longer the time horizon before we end up in another crisis where we have to find yet another innovative solution.
I just put my 8 and 10 yr olds on disney.com or nickelodeon.com and they never bother to try to find the rest of the net.
...yet. My kids are the same age, and while not limited to those sites, they tend to only seek out stuff that I find appropriate, like cartoons and games. They also spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, but usually only to look up stuff they learned at school, or to look up the actors in their favorite shows.
At some point, though, usually around the beginning of puberty (closer than you think for your 10 year old), they're going to start seeking this stuff out. No matter what you try to do to stop them, they'll find it eventually just like we found it when we were their age. We found it in scrambled cable channels and back issues of Playboy, they'll find it online. The stuff they'll find is likely to be a lot more explicit than the stuff we were able to find, although some of the images I found on the Internet at the tender age of 13, *mumble* years ago, were pretty hardcore. Of course, now they have full-motion video instead of the still images and occasional VHS tapes we had, but the concept is much the same.
The trick with dealing with all this is not to go crazy when they inevitably find it, but rather to take the time to explain what they're seeing in the greater context of the world. Being taught that porn is shameful and that they've done something horribly wrong by looking at it will do far more damage than simply helping them to put porn in its proper context. On the other hand, ignoring it completely and leaving them to their own devices to gather explanations of what they're seeing will leave them with unrealistic expectations of sex and intimacy that will damage them in the long run as well.
The key to all this is explaining topics as they come up. Many parents get asked by their very young children about sex and, rather than trying to explain it in an age-appropriate manner (detailed anatomical diagrams are probably not appropriate for 5 year olds, for example, since they won't understand them anyway), they try to avoid the question, or worse make the child feel as if they've done something wrong by asking it at all. This leads children to believe sex is a topic to be avoided, and they'll learn to be embarrassed about it and not want to talk to you about it. Later, when they find all this hardcore porn, they'll hide it from you and you'll never know what they've found or have the opportunity to explain it to them.
If you raise your kids to understand that they can talk to you about anything and you'll do your best to explain it to them in terms they can understand, they'll be more likely to give you the opportunity to help them process indecent material in a healthy way. If you raise your kids to think of sex as something not to be discussed even with you, they'll end up finding the stuff anyway but likely will not deal with it in a healthy way.
Slashdot Mirror
how much will this cost tax payers.
I'm guessing just about enough money to fight the war in Iraq for 5 minutes. Auditing and recoding government websites will probably cost several million dollars, but that's peanuts compared to most government spending, and it's more than worth it to make sure disabled people have access to the government they help pay for.
Sun had everything but a halfway competent management team that knew how to make money. Oracle, on the other hand, has a fantastic management team that specializes in making truckloads of money. You can have all the cool tech in the world, but if you can't make money with it you're doomed.
Four digit UIDs suck. Five digit UIDs that also happen to be prime numbers, on the other hand, are the pinnacle of awesome.
I agree with this, the only caveat being to do your homework first to make sure your CC classes transfer. Here in Texas, most of the universities and community colleges have long lists of courses that will transfer, so you can pretty much take your first two years at any community college and transfer without issue to most universities in the state. I've also been in states where this wasn't the case, though, or it only applied to certain colleges and universities, so you need to be careful so you don't waste your time on courses that don't transfer. And never go to one of the for-profit colleges like DeVry and expect anything to transfer.
Here in Austin I was able to take all of my core classes at Austin Community College, which is a great institution with lots of campuses and tons of evening, weekend, and online course offerings. It's also dirt cheap compared to any 4-year institution I've ever seen. Then, I could transfer to Texas State and take all of my classes in the evenings at their Round Rock location. All of this ended up being far cheaper in aggregate than any of those online-only colleges and my degree comes from an accredited university (albeit not exactly one on the top tier or anything) that doesn't get weird looks when people see it on a resume.
Face it: even if it is possible to get a decent education at an online university, the stigma against them in most industries is so huge that your resume is likely to get passed over if your degree is from one of them anyway. With many traditional universities and community colleges these days taking steps to cater to non-traditional students, it makes less and less sense to resort to an online university for your education. You don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars and end up with a degree that people will believe came from a diploma mill.
I dunno man, the last time I was thinking of the children and downloading torrents of pornography the FBI broke down my door.
This reminds me of something that really bugged me about this story on CNN. When CNN reported basically this same story yesterday, the link from their front page read "Former SNL Alum talks Net Neutrality" or something like that. Then you click, and it turns out they're talking about Senator Franken. It struck me as really disrespectful to refer to him that way. It would be like referring to the governor of California as "Former Body Builder Schwarzenegger" or our 40th president as "Former Actor Reagan".
Yes, Franken started out as a comedian, but he's now an elected United States Senator and should be afforded the same respect as any other Senator. Of course, the amount of respect we give to our senators tends to be vanishingly small (in most cases deservedly so), but we at least give them the dignity of referring to them by their proper title.
I'm probably overreacting, but I was surprised to see a supposedly serious news organization do something like that.
Procmail has been filtering email since 1990. Proving prior art on scanning a message for spam filtering should not be difficult.
36 slides
It figures he would make them into slides. Now all he needs to do is invite his extended family over to his house on false pretenses and subject them to an interminably long slide show. Brings back horrible, horrible memories.
People don't make career choices based on their passions because people have to eat. Sure it would be great if we could all follow our passions, but in practice the only people who can do that either have a passion for something that happens to pay really well or have giant trust funds from their rich parents. The rest of us have to go into whatever seems the least soul-crushing that will still pay the bills.
Your passion was software engineering which lucky for you happens to pay a lot. If your passion was playing the guitar or surfing, or even social work or teaching, your chances of making enough money to feed yourself, much less raise a family, following your dreams would be far lower.
It's also worth noting that passions change over time. Growing up my passion was computers, and it just so happened that I entered the work force right when the Internet was starting to take off so my passion was something I could get paid a lot of money to do. Now, though, while I still enjoy working with computers I wouldn't say I'm particularly passionate about it. I have other things I like to do, but none of them are going to pay the mortgage, so I keep working with computers.
I hear people say everyone should follow their dreams and I just want to smack them. Yes, spend some time in your early 20s following your dreams and seeing if you can make them work, but always have a backup plan. If you want to study music or underwater basket-weaving or whatever you love to do, fine, knock yourself out...but make sure you double major in something with more stable job prospects even if it doesn't get your heart racing thinking about doing it for the rest of your life. Then, if your passions don't end up being enough to live on you can go to your job that you're not passionate about all day and then go do whatever you're passionate about on the weekends like most people do.
Even if it's still technically beer, it isn't going to taste anything like beer. At beer's usually low alcohol content there are lots of subtle flavors that would get completely overwhelmed by the alcohol taste at 110 proof. You might as well just drink grain alcohol, it will probably taste about the same.
I always thought Playboy's target audience was housewives who want to look progressive by buying it for their husbands, and their 12-14 year old sons who steal it from the mailbox every month. I don't know where this "24-34 year old men" nonsense is coming from.
It's scary how prescient that article turned out to be.
Is it shark-mountable?
Probably, but it would burn the hell out of the shark's groin.
The problem with recruiting via the justice system, meaning recruiting black hats who get caught, is that you're hiring from a pool with demonstrated ethical issues. Sure, their technical skills may be top notch, but hiring someone who has already shown they're willing to circumvent legal and ethical boundaries just to satisfy their own curiosity is asking for trouble.
Anyone else a little weirded out by the WSJ image of Jeff Bezos trying to show you 1880s porn on his Kindle?
Yes, if you were able to see the whole picture you could very clearly see that the woman is showing her ankle in a highly provocative manner. Why, I've heard rumors of people using similar devices to show pictures of women posing completely hatless. It's absolutely shameful that this new "electronic book displaying contraption" is being used for such filth.
The problem is that most 20 year old kids don't really know how sensitive they are to things like this until they're repeatedly exposed to them, by which point much of the damage has already been done. Luckily for me, I was exposed to the Internet and all of the nastiness on it when I was only 13, and I've managed to get by with no ill effects at all except for the occasional extended blackout followed by a dead hooker in my bed. Some more sensitive people might really lose their minds, though.
I actually started watching the series during the last season of Tennant, so have been spending the last several weeks catching up on Eccleston and the parts of Tennant that I missed, so I've fallen behind a bit on the Smith series. Oops.
Smith took a little getting used to, but I have learned to like him. Eccleston and Tennant were very good as well. Honestly, since the show came back there hasn't been a bad or even mediocre doctor. I'm really not sold on Amy Pond yet though. She's pretty to look at, but I'm not sure I like the character. Also, the way they got rid of her fiancee seemed unnecessarily random and sudden like they've been trying to get rid of him the moment he was introduced (which they probably were). Maybe I was just spoiled with Donna and Rose who were both excellent characters with reasonably well-fleshed-out backstories.
I would hate to see Smith pull an Eccleston and leave right when he was really starting to make the character his own, though. It amazes me how people can come in saying playing the Doctor was their biggest dream in life (as Smith did) and then drop it so quickly.
Sorry, I shouldn't have said buzzwords. I meant the right technical stuff like "Linux", "PHP", stuff like that. If they have stuff like "creating corporate synergies" then they should indeed be shot.
If they have the right buzzwords on their resume, bring them in and ask them technical questions relevant to your environment. Then, throw in a few questions related to other technologies on their resume that aren't directly relevant to your environment just to see if they're the type of person who likes to puff up their resume by listing stuff they don't really know. You have to have at least a passing knowledge of the stuff you ask about, of course.
After you've established a baseline technical competency, ask them to solve a few simple programming problems to measure their problem solving ability. Doing them in PHP or Perl is obviously a bonus since you're dealing with LAMP, but pseudocode should be fine in a live interview type of situation. Don't judge things like missed semicolons too harshly, they're probably nervous. Concoct some basic scenarios dealing with the L or A part of the LAMP stack to judge their troubleshooting ability. Ask them for some SQL statements to pull certain data from a hypothetical database for the M part.
Interspersed throughout should be questions that judge how well they'll fit into your company culture and how easily they can learn new things or deal with new and unexpected situations. For these, concentrate on asking about past experiences of that type rather than asking canned hypotheticals that everyone has already seen on the Internet and knows how to answer.
A person's technical competence is not a reliable predictor of success. It's part of the equation, but his or her ability to learn and grow with the company, as well as the ability to fit in with your company culture, is much more important unless you're just looking for temporary contract labor.
Also, don't be afraid to ask your friendly neighborhood PHB. If he's taken any sort of business classes at all, and didn't spend the entire time Facebooking instead of paying attention, he should have plenty of insight on effective hiring.
Slashdot is just taking from the standard journalist's playbook: If you can tie a story to something that's currently very popular, especially Facebook or Twitter, you can get 10 times the page hits you would have normally gotten. If you can tie those things into a story that will generate lots of hits all on its own anyway, such as one dealing with sexual violence against children, your story might even go viral and you can just sit back and watch the ad revenue roll in.
I probably should have omitted the last four words, since they aren't really part of the quote. Other than that, blame any difficulties in comprehension on Mr. Shakespeare.
Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.- How now! who's there?
Clearly, Shakespeare had no love for lawyers or legal proceedings, and it's fair to say his audience probably didn't either. Some lawyers have tried to frame this as actually complimentary to lawyers, arguing that Shakespeare framed the men who were having this conversation as villains, but I think that's looking too deeply into it. Shakespeare wrote for his audience, and that whole scene was obviously intended primarily as comic relief. Throwing in a lawyer joke was an easy way to get laughs then just as it is now. The line about a single sealed (signed) document making one not his own man any more is the sort of biting social commentary Shakespeare often slipped into his comedies.
Exactly. Any data center engineers running into issues with the cost of power and cooling (ie, all of them) should be exploring both of these options. Whatever solutions we come up with, be they efficient machines or renewable on-site energy or both, are destined to become inadequate at some point as our computing needs inevitably expand to fill the available capacity. The more additive solutions we can pile on, the longer the time horizon before we end up in another crisis where we have to find yet another innovative solution.
I just put my 8 and 10 yr olds on disney.com or nickelodeon.com and they never bother to try to find the rest of the net.
...yet. My kids are the same age, and while not limited to those sites, they tend to only seek out stuff that I find appropriate, like cartoons and games. They also spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, but usually only to look up stuff they learned at school, or to look up the actors in their favorite shows.
At some point, though, usually around the beginning of puberty (closer than you think for your 10 year old), they're going to start seeking this stuff out. No matter what you try to do to stop them, they'll find it eventually just like we found it when we were their age. We found it in scrambled cable channels and back issues of Playboy, they'll find it online. The stuff they'll find is likely to be a lot more explicit than the stuff we were able to find, although some of the images I found on the Internet at the tender age of 13, *mumble* years ago, were pretty hardcore. Of course, now they have full-motion video instead of the still images and occasional VHS tapes we had, but the concept is much the same.
The trick with dealing with all this is not to go crazy when they inevitably find it, but rather to take the time to explain what they're seeing in the greater context of the world. Being taught that porn is shameful and that they've done something horribly wrong by looking at it will do far more damage than simply helping them to put porn in its proper context. On the other hand, ignoring it completely and leaving them to their own devices to gather explanations of what they're seeing will leave them with unrealistic expectations of sex and intimacy that will damage them in the long run as well.
The key to all this is explaining topics as they come up. Many parents get asked by their very young children about sex and, rather than trying to explain it in an age-appropriate manner (detailed anatomical diagrams are probably not appropriate for 5 year olds, for example, since they won't understand them anyway), they try to avoid the question, or worse make the child feel as if they've done something wrong by asking it at all. This leads children to believe sex is a topic to be avoided, and they'll learn to be embarrassed about it and not want to talk to you about it. Later, when they find all this hardcore porn, they'll hide it from you and you'll never know what they've found or have the opportunity to explain it to them.
If you raise your kids to understand that they can talk to you about anything and you'll do your best to explain it to them in terms they can understand, they'll be more likely to give you the opportunity to help them process indecent material in a healthy way. If you raise your kids to think of sex as something not to be discussed even with you, they'll end up finding the stuff anyway but likely will not deal with it in a healthy way.