Actually the Japanese can say their R's quite okay, it's L they have a problem with...
I had a Japanese roomate/friend/coworker for a while, and I'd beg to differ. We worked for weeks trying to get his english R's right (while I worked on trying to get my japanese ra, ri, ru, re, & ro right), especially on words that ended with an r (like door, more, etc).
One day we were leaving the appartment and he absentmindedly refered to closing the door and said it exactly right. "Iwi!" I almost yelled, "you said it!" Unfortunately, he never could reproduce it again.
(2) Add arbitrary vowels between them to make it a three syllable word: Sa-Qi-La.
(3) Observe that people will pronouce the middle term "Chi" or "Qui" or something like that.
(4) Change Q to K. Reflect on how the KDE project will be happy about this (Symbolic Kuery Language), and also, how it sounds like a Latin crossover star. Be pleased.
(5) Think of how cool the name Squall would have been. Masculin, sea-related, implies a disruptive yet powerful force, has S,Q, and L in it...
WTF? How? Do they get their service through Verisign, or are they held by Verisign now?
Arrrrg. Verisign is the hydra...
Re:Ever wondered *why* you're not getting jobs?
on
Resume Tips For Jobs
·
· Score: 2
But are they interviews for jobs you really want and are particularly well suited to?
One was nigh unto perfect for me. The other two were merely good fits. I generally don't apply for a job unless I know it's going to be somewhere where I'll contribute and enjoy putting skills to work.
My last job hunt lasted a month and I wound up with a job I love. I sent out exactly one resume after spending a day and a half on the cover letter. The cover letter detailed why this was the perfect job for me, and I the perfect candidate for the job
Would you mind posting the text? OK, emailing it?:)
Re:Ever wondered *why* you're not getting jobs?
on
Resume Tips For Jobs
·
· Score: 2
Your practice of not customizing obviously hasn't worked for you these last five months, so why are you offering this bad suggestion to others? Tailoring your application to the position is absolutely *vital*.
I should have given a little bit more information. I spent more time tailoring from May through July. The most response I got from any organization was an automated "Thank you... we've received... we'll keep you on file" response. I spent DAYS researching some of these companies, looking up Forrester and Gartner Group reports, scouring their websites, even emailing some companies who used the product made by the company I was trying to get a job at. Lots of serious investment, no return.
Starting in August, I decided to "play the numbers" -- I sent out more resumes and cover letters, spent less time researching and customizing. I got actual responses from human beings and three interviews. That's what makes me think this tactic is more effective.
Now, the investment I made up front in spending lots of time writing and rewriting cover letters those first few months is a part of what makes me able to dash off a cover letter in under and hour. I've written the "how my skills and background can work for you" part of a letter so many times that I don't need to spend much time thinking about it anymore, unless the position I'm applying for is off the beaten path and unusually interesting.
Bottom line: the second approach has gotten me more interviews, the job of a resume and cover letter. The carefully tailored approach wasted time. I now do my careful research and preparation before the interview.
If a job applicant can't even take the time to tailor the resume to the job I'm offering them, then why should I bother reading it?
Speaking as a person who's been looking since the end of April, I find myself getting very, very tired of customizing even cover letters for a job opportunity. I don't bother with customizing the resume anymore.
The reasoning is: I can spend 2-4 hours customizing the letter and the resume, and get out two high-quality applications in a day, possibly as much as doubling my chances of getting hired for a specific job -- or I can send out 4-8 times as many resumes, probably quadrupling my chances of getting hired for some job. Given the subjectivity of resume design and cover letter writing, I'm beginning to feel like the superior approach is to play the numbers and send out more applications.
Don't get me wrong. When I do come across a job I'm really interested in -- like a recent opportunity to webmaster for a senator's office or direct internet communications for a large government aid organization -- I pay attention and customize like crazy. And I'm still not sending out totally form-based cover letters... every one of them gets at least a few minutes of customization, sometimes 30 minutes to and hour.
But telling people to customize on every job they apply for seems like an exercise in futility.
I just noted a -1, Troll mod on this, and can't see why. This is a really interesting idea...
A while back I read an article by an environmental group discussing using funds to out-n-out purchase environmentally valuable lands, and then putting them in a trust. From that point on, you don't have to worry about regulations or which way the political wind blows, the land is simply administered according to the trust.
This is the same idea, but for intellectual property. It has its problems -- it only works as long as the property laws are applicable, it takes money to stake out the claim and administer it, and finally, it lends some legitimacy to what may be illegitimate processes. The best thing, though, is that you don't have to wait to change the world before you get to protect something important.
Disclaimer: I haven't ever installed a "pure darwin" setup... that is, one without the OS X "good desktop parts." Still... every time I've downloaded and configure/make/installled a typical UNIX tool, it's ended up working out. In the Public Beta days, some packages gave me a little trouble, but since 10.0.4, everything's gone right according to plan. Fink is supposed to make things even easier. Haven't tried it yet.
If most packages are that way, I can't see any reason using Darwin would be less desireable than any other BSD. Or Linux.
Apparently he should have installed 37 operating systems, instead of walking on water, healing people physically, saving them from sin, and rising from the dead.
Of course, he often is mentioned on slashdot, even aside from his mention by you... see these articles or comments.
numerical analysis becomes a thing of beauty after you have spent two years getting HAMMERED with advanced calculus courses.
But not if you have to do 40 iterations of Tchebyshev approximations by hand. Bloddy freakin' hell. I'd do anything from differential equations again before I'd touch that stuff without a computer. And I'm a person who thinks that doing linear regression analysis by hand is good for the soul.
Religeon says BELIEVE, don't doubt, don't apply logic or reasoning. Stay dumb and send me the money. Science says DOUBT, because doubt brings questioning, reason, logic, and finally the answer.
This is a massive oversimplification. My experience with religion has been that it says "Exercise faith in things which are true which are beyond pre-verification (or verification at all under certain epistemologies)." This is not all that different from certain observations about axiomatic systems made by Kurt Godel.
Not only that, but it's actually very easy to see religion as a personal spiritual experiment. If a religion teaches you a principle, and you apply it, you've had a chance to perform an experiment and see if you gain the same results. It will never be clinical double-blind, but that's not what matters. What matters is whether or not there's fruit in your life. (And remember, clinical double-blind studies have their weakenesses. Phen-phen was supposedly tested in this way. Too bad a friend of mine destroyed her heart with it).
Most people in a religious community don't talk about it so much, but doubt serves a role. I sometimes see it as a bit like gravity in the flight process: you don't want it to be the ruling force, but its presence makes conventional air travel possible by providing an anchor for the fluid that airfoils use to provide lift. Doubt provides tension that pulls you toward confronting a question and answering it with a decision.
Of course, that only works if your religion is about real human and divine transformation. Doesn't work in a "hold a dogma/cosmology at all costs" kind of religion, which you may be assuming all religions are. Common mistake, by both "believers" on "non-believers".
I worked as a developer in a major university library for about two years. The system I worked on only tracked requests made to borrow books through other universities, but it kept ALL of them. Your whole history. This system was used at a whole host of other libraries, including NYU, ASU, Berkely, and more.
The main system that kept track of circulation for the whole library also kept all requests to a certain point... but even after it purged, every time something was overdue, THOSE records were kept indefinitely. And it gets worse. I shouldn't have known any of this: it was outside my employee privileges, but several reference librarians kept the username and password posted on post-it notes, and being able to look up my own circulation records via telnet (or tnvt3270 or whatever it was) was way too convenient. From that point, looking up someone else's circ records was often way too interesting.... oh, and did I mention that the library used your SSN as a unique ID?
Anyway, the point is, the system saved lots of your information, and it was fairly easy to get to it. If we were counting on practices of libraries to preserve anonyminity, I wouldn't feel all that secure....
(disclaimer: I made slightly different version of this comment weeks ago, but it seemed like it bears repeating....)
Well, you can see what they run their website off of...
You should also note that quite a few newspapers run their presses of some sort of Unix, some in tandem with Macs. This may be mostly the smaller papers (the one's I've had contact with), but that setup seems to work for quite a few.
On some computers, you'd be insane to even try running a 5.x browser. Browsers are some of the most memory and processor hungry applications your average user can come across. On one of my machines (and old Performa 6116), even running a 4.x browser is foolish. I'm using Netscape 3.x when I run anything on that thing. Or Lynx. Same with a Win 95 PC.
The real point shouldn't be to abandon older browsers: it should be to fight layout complexity. XHTML + CSS is a wonderful tool in this game. I love Blue Robot.... I finally got semantic layout/CSS when I saw it, and the upside was that it degrades perfectly.
Wisely designing to standards doesn't abandon the older browser... rather, it means you can use Netscape 1.0 or Mosaic or Lynx to use a page, and when you use Mozilla 1.0, you get all the purty layout and bells and whistles.
Malcom Gladwell of the New Yorker recently wrote an article about some of the problems with "World Class" management teams, and in general, certain myths revolving around the concept of "talent". It's an excellent read.
"Eventually, [webmasters] will integrate their content into these programs, so you won't visit the golf Web site, you'll start up the golf program," Potter added.
"The browser's not even going to matter."
I have big doubts about this... the web revolution happened precisely because all you needed to access all the (at first) static information and (then later) applications (like hotmail, eBay, Amazon,etc) was a simple web browser. Finally, a darn near ubiquitous client existed.
This sounds like a backward step if it means that these applications will begin to take on life outside the browser. I'm in favor of net-enabled applications, but my guess is that applications which try to leave the browser won't catch on in the same way that those who can do everything inside it will.
There are certain films I'd be more than happy to see in IMAX theatres... ATOC probably being one of them, Matrix... anything that's stunning visually and is a good ride. I don't know how much Sense and Sensibility or even some Jackie Chan films would fit in.
But most of all, I worry about whether the current really interesting IMAX fare would be replaced by Hollywood dreck. After all, it sells, right? The day that "To the limit" is replaced by "Gone in 60 seconds" is the day the IMAX stuff will stop meaning much.
Oh, I'm definitely a consumer, just like most other life forms. It's just not all I am. The consistent use of the word in the context of policy discussion is revealing, though: that's how individual human beings are seen, due to the magic reductionist science of economics.
Mind you, reductionist science is useful. It just has its limits, and social policy should reflect that.
Technically correct, mammal, but then again, so would calling you full of shit be (unless you're on one of those darn cleansing diets) It's the connotation that counts.
The point, my hominid friend, is that the frequent use of the word combined with the very reductionistic philosophy of American and Western Culture in general, means that people begin to be viewed as only consumers.
The Matrix wasn't insightful because it was plausibly efficient for machines to actually use dream-conked humans as a source of power. It was a metaphor for a system something like it... in which human beings are abstracted away into income sources encouraged, required, or forced to consume what you offer. For the right price, of course.
So anyway, to some people, calling them a "consumer" is like calling them "coppertop".
"Peer-to-peer technology is sortof like the high tech version of students playing their CDs in their cars. It has the potential to do what word of mouth did for me... You give something to your audience, and it always seems to come back somehow."
He's one of several localUtah artists who have eschewed label deals -- not because they couldn't get them, but because they knew they'd likely get ripped off. Each of those bands make money when they play a show, and sell lots of CDs. Why sign with the label if you will suddenly make no money off of CD sales until you go platinum?
Prince may have been not particularly articulate, but he's right. Artists are realizing the system doesn't do much for them, and standing outside. They lose the possibility of making it huge overnight, but they keep control of their art and careers, and the good ones -- funny thing -- succeed anyway.
And P2P, as it turns out, can help. Again, funny thing.
Janis Ian's fan demographic is a generation that has a life outside of a computer -- and very little of their hobby/spare time on it. Brittney's demographic is a generation saturated in media and pop culture,
raised on computers, and you're some kind of weirdo if you've never used IM.
Not exactly a fair comparison.
Though I appreciate you picking Brittney for the illustration about the complete independence of popularity and relative quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the Japanese can say their R's quite okay, it's L they have a problem with...
I had a Japanese roomate/friend/coworker for a while, and I'd beg to differ. We worked for weeks trying to get his english R's right (while I worked on trying to get my japanese ra, ri, ru, re, & ro right), especially on words that ended with an r (like door, more, etc).
One day we were leaving the appartment and he absentmindedly refered to closing the door and said it exactly right. "Iwi!" I almost yelled, "you said it!" Unfortunately, he never could reproduce it again.
(1)Take the letters S,Q, and L.
(2) Add arbitrary vowels between them to make it a three syllable word: Sa-Qi-La.
(3) Observe that people will pronouce the middle term "Chi" or "Qui" or something like that.
(4) Change Q to K. Reflect on how the KDE project will be happy about this (Symbolic Kuery Language), and also, how it sounds like a Latin crossover star. Be pleased.
(5) Think of how cool the name Squall would have been. Masculin, sea-related, implies a disruptive yet powerful force, has S,Q, and L in it...
(6) Sigh.
and Thawte, which is also Verisign
WTF? How? Do they get their service through Verisign, or are they held by Verisign now?
Arrrrg. Verisign is the hydra...
But are they interviews for jobs you really want and are particularly well suited to?
:)
One was nigh unto perfect for me. The other two were merely good fits. I generally don't apply for a job unless I know it's going to be somewhere where I'll contribute and enjoy putting skills to work.
My last job hunt lasted a month and I wound up with a job I love. I sent out exactly one resume after spending a day and a half on the cover letter. The cover letter detailed why this was the perfect job for me, and I the perfect candidate for the job
Would you mind posting the text? OK, emailing it?
Your practice of not customizing obviously hasn't worked for you these last five months, so why are you offering this bad suggestion to others? Tailoring your application to the position is absolutely *vital*.
I should have given a little bit more information. I spent more time tailoring from May through July. The most response I got from any organization was an automated "Thank you... we've received... we'll keep you on file" response. I spent DAYS researching some of these companies, looking up Forrester and Gartner Group reports, scouring their websites, even emailing some companies who used the product made by the company I was trying to get a job at. Lots of serious investment, no return.
Starting in August, I decided to "play the numbers" -- I sent out more resumes and cover letters, spent less time researching and customizing. I got actual responses from human beings and three interviews. That's what makes me think this tactic is more effective.
Now, the investment I made up front in spending lots of time writing and rewriting cover letters those first few months is a part of what makes me able to dash off a cover letter in under and hour. I've written the "how my skills and background can work for you" part of a letter so many times that I don't need to spend much time thinking about it anymore, unless the position I'm applying for is off the beaten path and unusually interesting.
Bottom line: the second approach has gotten me more interviews, the job of a resume and cover letter. The carefully tailored approach wasted time. I now do my careful research and preparation before the interview.
If a job applicant can't even take the time to tailor the resume to the job I'm offering them, then why should I bother reading it?
Speaking as a person who's been looking since the end of April, I find myself getting very, very tired of customizing even cover letters for a job opportunity. I don't bother with customizing the resume anymore.
The reasoning is: I can spend 2-4 hours customizing the letter and the resume, and get out two high-quality applications in a day, possibly as much as doubling my chances of getting hired for a specific job -- or I can send out 4-8 times as many resumes, probably quadrupling my chances of getting hired for some job. Given the subjectivity of resume design and cover letter writing, I'm beginning to feel like the superior approach is to play the numbers and send out more applications.
Don't get me wrong. When I do come across a job I'm really interested in -- like a recent opportunity to webmaster for a senator's office or direct internet communications for a large government aid organization -- I pay attention and customize like crazy. And I'm still not sending out totally form-based cover letters... every one of them gets at least a few minutes of customization, sometimes 30 minutes to and hour.
But telling people to customize on every job they apply for seems like an exercise in futility.
OK, so how much salt do you need to dump at the traditional sinking water column areas to restart the conveyor?
Well, about 10% of the volume of water melted from the polar ice caps, if I remember correctly about the salinity of ocean water...
This is great! Algebra II teachers everywhere can FINALLY point out a direct use for those fluid % mix problems they torture 10th graders with.
I just noted a -1, Troll mod on this, and can't see why. This is a really interesting idea...
A while back I read an article by an environmental group discussing using funds to out-n-out purchase environmentally valuable lands, and then putting them in a trust. From that point on, you don't have to worry about regulations or which way the political wind blows, the land is simply administered according to the trust.
This is the same idea, but for intellectual property. It has its problems -- it only works as long as the property laws are applicable, it takes money to stake out the claim and administer it, and finally, it lends some legitimacy to what may be illegitimate processes. The best thing, though, is that you don't have to wait to change the world before you get to protect something important.
There ought to be more people doing this...
Disclaimer: I haven't ever installed a "pure darwin" setup... that is, one without the OS X "good desktop parts." Still... every time I've downloaded and configure/make/installled a typical UNIX tool, it's ended up working out. In the Public Beta days, some packages gave me a little trouble, but since 10.0.4, everything's gone right according to plan. Fink is supposed to make things even easier. Haven't tried it yet.
If most packages are that way, I can't see any reason using Darwin would be less desireable than any other BSD. Or Linux.
Apparently he should have installed 37 operating systems, instead of walking on water, healing people physically, saving them from sin, and rising from the dead.
Of course, he often is mentioned on slashdot, even aside from his mention by you... see these articles or comments.
See Matthew 25:34-40 for another thought or perspective, too.
Of course, you probably meant interviewed, which is something else entirely...
If not, could we at least persuade moderators to use "-1 Redundant" on all these things? It's obviously all been done...
If not, could all you "profit!!!" fiends please start combining other old tired jokes? For example:
If not, please find a dirigible covered in aluminum nitrate, OK? If not for you, then for me....
numerical analysis becomes a thing of beauty after you have spent two years getting HAMMERED with advanced calculus courses.
But not if you have to do 40 iterations of Tchebyshev approximations by hand. Bloddy freakin' hell. I'd do anything from differential equations again before I'd touch that stuff without a computer. And I'm a person who thinks that doing linear regression analysis by hand is good for the soul.
-W
Religeon says BELIEVE, don't doubt, don't apply logic or reasoning. Stay dumb and send me the money.
Science says DOUBT, because doubt brings questioning, reason, logic, and finally the answer.
This is a massive oversimplification. My experience with religion has been that it says "Exercise faith in things which are true which are beyond pre-verification (or verification at all under certain epistemologies)." This is not all that different from certain observations about axiomatic systems made by Kurt Godel.
Not only that, but it's actually very easy to see religion as a personal spiritual experiment. If a religion teaches you a principle, and you apply it, you've had a chance to perform an experiment and see if you gain the same results. It will never be clinical double-blind, but that's not what matters. What matters is whether or not there's fruit in your life. (And remember, clinical double-blind studies have their weakenesses. Phen-phen was supposedly tested in this way. Too bad a friend of mine destroyed her heart with it).
Most people in a religious community don't talk about it so much, but doubt serves a role. I sometimes see it as a bit like gravity in the flight process: you don't want it to be the ruling force, but its presence makes conventional air travel possible by providing an anchor for the fluid that airfoils use to provide lift. Doubt provides tension that pulls you toward confronting a question and answering it with a decision.
Of course, that only works if your religion is about real human and divine transformation. Doesn't work in a "hold a dogma/cosmology at all costs" kind of religion, which you may be assuming all religions are. Common mistake, by both "believers" on "non-believers".
A contrasting view:
I worked as a developer in a major university library for about two years. The system I worked on only tracked requests made to borrow books through other universities, but it kept ALL of them. Your whole history. This system was used at a whole host of other libraries, including NYU, ASU, Berkely, and more.
The main system that kept track of circulation for the whole library also kept all requests to a certain point... but even after it purged, every time something was overdue, THOSE records were kept indefinitely. And it gets worse. I shouldn't have known any of this: it was outside my employee privileges, but several reference librarians kept the username and password posted on post-it notes, and being able to look up my own circulation records via telnet (or tnvt3270 or whatever it was) was way too convenient. From that point, looking up someone else's circ records was often way too interesting.... oh, and did I mention that the library used your SSN as a unique ID?
Anyway, the point is, the system saved lots of your information, and it was fairly easy to get to it. If we were counting on practices of libraries to preserve anonyminity, I wouldn't feel all that secure....
(disclaimer: I made slightly different version of this comment weeks ago, but it seemed like it bears repeating....)
Well, you can see what they run their website off of...
You should also note that quite a few newspapers run their presses of some sort of Unix, some in tandem with Macs. This may be mostly the smaller papers (the one's I've had contact with), but that setup seems to work for quite a few.
The interesting surprise for me is the idea of WMA-enabled applications running under Linux. Is this a first?
Can you say "Old Machines" and "Default Install"?
.... I finally got semantic layout/CSS when I saw it, and the upside was that it degrades perfectly.
On some computers, you'd be insane to even try running a 5.x browser. Browsers are some of the most memory and processor hungry applications your average user can come across. On one of my machines (and old Performa 6116), even running a 4.x browser is foolish. I'm using Netscape 3.x when I run anything on that thing. Or Lynx. Same with a Win 95 PC.
The real point shouldn't be to abandon older browsers: it should be to fight layout complexity. XHTML + CSS is a wonderful tool in this game. I love Blue Robot
Wisely designing to standards doesn't abandon the older browser... rather, it means you can use Netscape 1.0 or Mosaic or Lynx to use a page, and when you use Mozilla 1.0, you get all the purty layout and bells and whistles.
Malcom Gladwell of the New Yorker recently wrote an article about some of the problems with "World Class" management teams, and in general, certain myths revolving around the concept of "talent". It's an excellent read.
From the article:
"Eventually, [webmasters] will integrate their content into these programs, so you won't visit the golf Web site, you'll start up the golf program," Potter added.
"The browser's not even going to matter."
I have big doubts about this... the web revolution happened precisely because all you needed to access all the (at first) static information and (then later) applications (like hotmail, eBay, Amazon,etc) was a simple web browser. Finally, a darn near ubiquitous client existed.
This sounds like a backward step if it means that these applications will begin to take on life outside the browser. I'm in favor of net-enabled applications, but my guess is that applications which try to leave the browser won't catch on in the same way that those who can do everything inside it will.
There are certain films I'd be more than happy to see in IMAX theatres... ATOC probably being one of them, Matrix... anything that's stunning visually and is a good ride. I don't know how much Sense and Sensibility or even some Jackie Chan films would fit in.
But most of all, I worry about whether the current really interesting IMAX fare would be replaced by Hollywood dreck. After all, it sells, right? The day that "To the limit" is replaced by "Gone in 60 seconds" is the day the IMAX stuff will stop meaning much.
Oh, I'm definitely a consumer, just like most other life forms. It's just not all I am. The consistent use of the word in the context of policy discussion is revealing, though: that's how individual human beings are seen, due to the magic reductionist science of economics.
Mind you, reductionist science is useful. It just has its limits, and social policy should reflect that.
If you do it is correct to call you a consumer.
Technically correct, mammal, but then again, so would calling you full of shit be (unless you're on one of those darn cleansing diets) It's the connotation that counts.
The point, my hominid friend, is that the frequent use of the word combined with the very reductionistic philosophy of American and Western Culture in general, means that people begin to be viewed as only consumers.
The Matrix wasn't insightful because it was plausibly efficient for machines to actually use dream-conked humans as a source of power. It was a metaphor for a system something like it... in which human beings are abstracted away into income sources encouraged, required, or forced to consume what you offer. For the right price, of course.
So anyway, to some people, calling them a "consumer" is like calling them "coppertop".
Put this in your pipe and smoke it.
OK, for those too lazy to click on the link:
"Peer-to-peer technology is sortof like the high tech version of students playing their CDs in their cars. It has the potential to do what word of mouth did for me... You give something to your audience, and it always seems to come back somehow."
--Peter Breinholt
He's one of several local Utah artists who have eschewed label deals -- not because they couldn't get them, but because they knew they'd likely get ripped off. Each of those bands make money when they play a show, and sell lots of CDs. Why sign with the label if you will suddenly make no money off of CD sales until you go platinum?
Prince may have been not particularly articulate, but he's right. Artists are realizing the system doesn't do much for them, and standing outside. They lose the possibility of making it huge overnight, but they keep control of their art and careers, and the good ones -- funny thing -- succeed anyway.
And P2P, as it turns out, can help. Again, funny thing.
Janis Ian's fan demographic is a generation that has a life outside of a computer -- and very little of their hobby/spare time on it. Brittney's demographic is a generation saturated in media and pop culture,
raised on computers, and you're some kind of weirdo if you've never used IM.
Not exactly a fair comparison.
Though I appreciate you picking Brittney for the illustration about the complete independence of popularity and relative quality.
But.... in the event of a big solar flare or a nuke going off his house becomes just like mine!
Then again, I suppose if either of those events were to happen, maybe audio/video on demand and cool touchscreens wouldn't be your biggest worries.