I guess I also qualify as an early adopter. I have seventeen years til that magic age.
I'm doing something about it right now. I've started, and am nurturing, a small web design and development business on the side. It's beginning to thrive. Two years from now, when the last kid gets out of college and the financial burden isn't so great, I'm going to ease into that full time and jump off my current treadmill, which involves consulting on assorted network-related issues.
I honestly can't perceive of myself ever tiring of computers and their technology. The difference as I see it will be I'll be working for myself, and for pure love of the game.
I also think teaching is a dandy idea. I'd especially like to be a mentor to young women of secondary school age, perhaps to help them see that a life of techology doesn't condemn them to a life of boredom.
Have a great time. I'll be joining you in seventeen years!
Umm. As long as you're not cheating or attempting to beat their systems, casinos LOVE it if you're lucky. They'll treat you with great pomp and ceremony if you're lucky. Why do you suppose all those bells go off when somebody hits a jackpot at the slot machines? It's so everyone within earshot can turn around, see the lucky individual get paid off, and turn back to feed in yet another token.
They don't have to worry about folks who have a run of good luck. The odds are in their favor over the long haul, and they'll continue to rake in their profits regardless. As for cheating, counting cards, or whatever? They're pretty astute about that, too.
I'm not sure I perceive a difference between a casino barring a cheat and the supermarket barring a shoplifter.
Annie
I've been an unhappy Verizon customer for years --long before DSL (when our little Bell was still Bell Atlantic), they had a reputation for lousy, slipshod customer service. I could list a litany of complaints against them going back twenty years, and so could just about any other resident of Baltimore/Washington.
When it came time to begin thinking about the whole broadband and home networking thing, we dragged our feet because we figured if Verizon could screw up our POTS service as they so often have, they could do a really monumental job of screwing up the DSL connections.
The result has been that while neighbors and co-workers fume and swear about their Verizon DSL experience, we're still using dial-up.
I console myself that it will soon actually be possible to make good on threats to take one's POTS business elsewhere, and that at that point Verizon will have to do something about its customer service as well as its myriad of technical problems.
I think there's a lot of smoke being blown with this story. If Verizon had done a better job in the past, I might be inclined to believe them.
I suppose this takes the place of the good old-fashioned methods which involved showing up at PTA meetings, making oneself known to the kid's teachers, and occasionally putting pen to paper (or picking up the phone) to say "How's Junior doing?" By that method it's not a question of snooping (however much the child may think so). It's a question of a set of parents and a school forming an alliance with a common interest: The benefit, guidance, and oversight of a child.
I may be the only one, but I can pick out some common threads here with yesterday's story about the standardized tests. It's as though we are now building a sort of Kid-o-Matic. Parents don't want to guide. Schools don't want to educate. Let's just choose a few pieces of expensive software, put our hands over our ears, close our eyes, and in a few years the kids will grow up and go away. If they don't turn out real well it won't matter because they won't be our responsibility any more.
Sorry,
Annie
(Who is aware that this does an injustice to every caring parent and conscientious educator who reads it.)
There are lots of good comments here, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the help that a good nighttime routine can be.
Avoid using your bed as an office, communications center, or TV lounge. Regard it as a place to rest, sleep, and do the other sorts of things normally associated with being in bed.:)
Exercise is fine, but plan to exercise earlier in the evening so you've had a change to cool down before you're ready to sleep. Don't snack too heavily late in the evening, either. Milk is said to contain natural substances that promote sleep.
Try to get into the same routine on work nights. It can be whatever is comfortable for you -- shower/read for a few minutes/glass of milk/pray or meditate if that's your spiritual path/sleep. Just try to follow the same basic pathway every evening. This quiet routine is how loving parents assist their infants in developing good sleep patterns, and it works just was well for us as adults.
If you can compose yourself for sleep, and associate a routine with sleep, you may be pleasantly surprised to find you're waking up ready to move out before your alarm has gone off.
You might as well cruise on over to Salon and read this article on the subject of Charles Darwin and the state of Louisiana. It seems they have condemned Darwin as a racist and the root cause of all worldwide racist activities from the Holocaust to the Klan. It gives them a wonderful reason for quashing the teaching of evolution in their excellent public schools.
Apparently this idea has caught on in many quarters, so it's predicted to be a tough year for evolution. The ironies of Louisiana condemning anybody as racist are just too subtle and numerous to comment on.
I've been carrying one for years. The difference is that now I have the luxury of turning it off between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Here is the old, traditional, and fair way of doing it:
If you are earning an hourly wage, they should pay you a small differential for the times you carry the pager outside of normal working hours--like the second or third shift differential paid in some companies. The minute it goes off, and you go on the clock, you should be paid your normal hourly rate, plus overtime if you've already worked your full quota for the day, week, or however it's handled where you are. Your obligation in exchange for that differential is to answer the page in a timely fashion.
Do you need a lawyer? Or do you need to gather information provided by the folks reading Slashdot, who are reporting to you from the trenches, so that you can discuss the issue with your manager in a coherent, low-key fashion?
While you're dealing with the vibrations, be sure to watch out for the dust -- where you've got one, there's a good chance you'll be dealing with the other.
I wouldn't try to protect the systems in any way -- just keep an eye on their outside cases and be prepared to clean a little more often. I neglected this in an at-home machine several years back while some wallboard was being fixed, and what I found inside after the work was done was a bit alarming. If I'd just dusted the case often with a clean cloth, I could have kept a lot of that dust away from the components.
I hope the construction goes away soon. It's not much fun.
Annie
I'm afraid that mediocrity will be the standard in our schools for a long time to come. It's deplorable, but it's true. Kids who "don't fit the mold" in whatever sense (gifted, physically challenged, "foreign") cause trouble. They force the adults in charge to think, to use their creativity, to respond. Far easier when you're just drawing a paycheck, to focus on the herd at the expense of the troublemakers. And this includes a certain tolerance for bullying.
Our solution to all of this when our boys were younger was to put them in a small private school. In our case, the school was Catholic. Whatever anybody may have to say about Catholic schools in general, at this school the individual kid was respected, parental involvement was more than a spiel, and there was zero tolerance for bullying in any form.
You might look around to see if a similar school is available in your community. The drawback can be the expense, but there are scholarships around, especially for youngsters as talented and bright as Sean seems to be. Failing that, I think you're smart to home-school him. I suspect he's formed his own friendships and associations independent of the school-herd, so socializing shouldn't be an issue.
Above all, console yourselves. In a very few years you'll be rewarded. You'll have an intelligent, capable, mature young man who has a head start in the adult world. So just dig in and hang on.
Annie
(Incidentally, today's news also brings word of the suspension from school of a thirteen-year-old deaf student in New Jersey. Her "crime" was using Sign Language on the schoolbus...)
Easy enough to find out if you are taking a day off and have nothing else to do. I ran the main page through CAST's "Bobby" validator. Sadly, Slashdot flunked. But not by much. The report:
This page does not meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Below is a list of 1 Priority 1 accessibility errors found:
Provide alternative text for all images. (1 instance)
Line 16
Not bad by comparison with a lot of what's on the Web -- probably somebody just had an off day, right?
The serious lesson here is that if you want to make your pages accessible, CAST is a good starting place. They will cite you W3 chapter and verse for everything they find. I'm sure there are other Web-based validators around. Good job, Slashdot!
About three years ago an acquaintance who worked in a small office asked me to come in and have a look at their server, which was "acting strangely." Nobody could remember the last time the box had been maintained or looked at, though they had been faithfully running weekly backups.
The server was running NetWare 2.15, and as nearly as I could tell, it had been running uninterrupted for a little over eight years -- never rebooted, never maintained. Its 300 megabyte full-height SCSI hard drive (sitting on a DCB, remember those?) was in its death throes. The box itself was a very early 386.
The sad part about it was, I could have restored the whole setup onto a newer box, except that the diskette called "Gendata" was missing from the set. That was a serialized diskette, and at some point somebody had put it away for safekeeping, and it couldn't be found. I offered to contact Novell, thinking they'd be interested in the project for historical amusement if nothing else. But the people in the office decided to upgrade.
That was probably a wise move on their part, but I shut that server down with feelings of nostalgia and regret. They had certainly gotten their money's worth out of it and out of its O/S.
I knew, but have gotten out of touch with, a man who was blind and worked as a Novell administrator. He also ran a FidoNet BBS, which may tell you just how very long ago it was. The NetWare gave him no problems, because its menus were all text-based. He had a Braille printer which in those days was a fabulously expensive proposition.
What always fascinated me was that in those long-ago days, his preferred o/s for general work, for his BBS, etc. was OS/2. IBM was very responsive to the requirements of users with various disabilities. Microsoft was not, at least not initially. Blind end-users had more than a few Maalox moments when it began to appear that the GUI, in the form of Windows 3.x, was going to prevail in the business world.
You can't use hamsters to pull a dogsled because they are tropical animals, and if you take them to the Arctic, they will freeze their little hamster tushies off.
How about snowshoe hares or baby seals?
On the other hand, with the current trends in global warming and projected melting of the polar ice caps, maybe the idea of using hamsters isn't so very far-fetched after all.
Stalin arguably killed more people (perhaps 20 million) during his time in power than Hitler could even dream of -- the crucial difference being that in contrast to the Holocaust, Stalin's killings weren't focused on the eradication of a single people.
From a military standpoint (at least at the time of World War II), one could say with conviction that Hitler was stupid to invade Russia. He diluted his forces (which weren't in the best shape to begin with at that point) and historically, no one had ever successfully invaded Russia.
Why did the people of the Soviet Union allow all of this to go on? The author Boris Pasternak speaks of the Russians' "cursed capacity for suffering," and I think the answer lies there. We can't begin to conceive of how downtrodden and utterly hopeless these people were -- yet still they fought on.
To me it's more interesting to ponder the relationship between the Allies and Josef Stalin. He was needed to win the war, but he certainly could have given Hitler lessons in brutality.
But be certain you've concluded some kind of arrangement with the donor organization about what's to be done with the real "junkers," the parts that just won't function any more after you've finished your testing/salvaging/rebuilding efforts. There is much in old hardware that is toxic (lead, arsenic, and other unsavory stuff), and you may find that your friendly local landfill or trash guys won't let you throw the stuff away. Without looking a gift horse in the mouth, be certain you've got some way to get rid of the remains. Having done that, best of luck to you! I think you'll find what you're about to undertake is very rewarding. Cheers, Annie
Well, hello from the other end of the age spectrum. I have been working in information technologies for over twenty years, most of that time as the sole female in groups of sociopathic, dateless, unfortunate-looking and occasionally un-bathed men. Yes, many of them were pigs (in the tradition of what we've been treated to here in response to your post) and if you forget about it for too long, they'll find a way to remind you. Fortunately, as in other fields of endeavor, there are also nice people around. Seek them out.
If you want to be successful in your chosen field, you'll have to work twice as hard as all of these anonymous cowards and bitter old men, and be twice as intelligent. Fortunately this is not difficult, and you'll probably succeed admirably.
What makes you think that miners are any less intelligent than you are? For generations, young men became miners because there was no other gainful, honest employment available in whatever part of the world they happened to have grown up in. They didn't do it because they were stupid. They did it because economics and reality offered them no other choice.
If devices like this offer a way to save human lives -- not to mention human health -- then that's a good ting. If the devices can begin to eliminate strip mining and the pollution engendered by traditional mining operations, then that's a real bonus.
As for the "young, stupid" miners, I'd suggest you not worry too much about them. We can encourage them all to become software engineers...
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I also qualify as an early adopter. I have seventeen years til that magic age.
I'm doing something about it right now. I've started, and am nurturing, a small web design and development business on the side. It's beginning to thrive. Two years from now, when the last kid gets out of college and the financial burden isn't so great, I'm going to ease into that full time and jump off my current treadmill, which involves consulting on assorted network-related issues.
I honestly can't perceive of myself ever tiring of computers and their technology. The difference as I see it will be I'll be working for myself, and for pure love of the game.
I also think teaching is a dandy idea. I'd especially like to be a mentor to young women of secondary school age, perhaps to help them see that a life of techology doesn't condemn them to a life of boredom.
Have a great time. I'll be joining you in seventeen years!
Annie
Umm. As long as you're not cheating or attempting to beat their systems, casinos LOVE it if you're lucky. They'll treat you with great pomp and ceremony if you're lucky. Why do you suppose all those bells go off when somebody hits a jackpot at the slot machines? It's so everyone within earshot can turn around, see the lucky individual get paid off, and turn back to feed in yet another token. They don't have to worry about folks who have a run of good luck. The odds are in their favor over the long haul, and they'll continue to rake in their profits regardless. As for cheating, counting cards, or whatever? They're pretty astute about that, too. I'm not sure I perceive a difference between a casino barring a cheat and the supermarket barring a shoplifter. Annie
I've been an unhappy Verizon customer for years --long before DSL (when our little Bell was still Bell Atlantic), they had a reputation for lousy, slipshod customer service. I could list a litany of complaints against them going back twenty years, and so could just about any other resident of Baltimore/Washington.
When it came time to begin thinking about the whole broadband and home networking thing, we dragged our feet because we figured if Verizon could screw up our POTS service as they so often have, they could do a really monumental job of screwing up the DSL connections.
The result has been that while neighbors and co-workers fume and swear about their Verizon DSL experience, we're still using dial-up.
I console myself that it will soon actually be possible to make good on threats to take one's POTS business elsewhere, and that at that point Verizon will have to do something about its customer service as well as its myriad of technical problems.
I think there's a lot of smoke being blown with this story. If Verizon had done a better job in the past, I might be inclined to believe them.
Annie
I'm taking my Mac and moving out of the country...
This sounds like a conversation you should be having with the ACLU...
I suppose this takes the place of the good old-fashioned methods which involved showing up at PTA meetings, making oneself known to the kid's teachers, and occasionally putting pen to paper (or picking up the phone) to say "How's Junior doing?" By that method it's not a question of snooping (however much the child may think so). It's a question of a set of parents and a school forming an alliance with a common interest: The benefit, guidance, and oversight of a child.
I may be the only one, but I can pick out some common threads here with yesterday's story about the standardized tests. It's as though we are now building a sort of Kid-o-Matic. Parents don't want to guide. Schools don't want to educate. Let's just choose a few pieces of expensive software, put our hands over our ears, close our eyes, and in a few years the kids will grow up and go away. If they don't turn out real well it won't matter because they won't be our responsibility any more.
Sorry,
Annie
(Who is aware that this does an injustice to every caring parent and conscientious educator who reads it.)
OK. Then this will make you feel better: I was running around Washington, DC building and installing NetWare servers. I was 41...
Annie
There are lots of good comments here, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the help that a good nighttime routine can be.
:)
Avoid using your bed as an office, communications center, or TV lounge. Regard it as a place to rest, sleep, and do the other sorts of things normally associated with being in bed.
Exercise is fine, but plan to exercise earlier in the evening so you've had a change to cool down before you're ready to sleep. Don't snack too heavily late in the evening, either. Milk is said to contain natural substances that promote sleep.
Try to get into the same routine on work nights. It can be whatever is comfortable for you -- shower/read for a few minutes/glass of milk/pray or meditate if that's your spiritual path/sleep. Just try to follow the same basic pathway every evening. This quiet routine is how loving parents assist their infants in developing good sleep patterns, and it works just was well for us as adults.
If you can compose yourself for sleep, and associate a routine with sleep, you may be pleasantly surprised to find you're waking up ready to move out before your alarm has gone off.
Sweet dreams!
Annie
I am affronted!
Anne
(Proud former sysop, The Keeping Room 1:261/1055 HST)
I'm going to post mine before I go look at everybody else's:
1.618
Annie
You might as well cruise on over to Salon and read this article on the subject of Charles Darwin and the state of Louisiana. It seems they have condemned Darwin as a racist and the root cause of all worldwide racist activities from the Holocaust to the Klan. It gives them a wonderful reason for quashing the teaching of evolution in their excellent public schools.
Apparently this idea has caught on in many quarters, so it's predicted to be a tough year for evolution. The ironies of Louisiana condemning anybody as racist are just too subtle and numerous to comment on.
Cheers,
Annie
Yep. It's called a Macintosh G4 PowerBook...
Annie
I've been carrying one for years. The difference is that now I have the luxury of turning it off between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Here is the old, traditional, and fair way of doing it:
If you are earning an hourly wage, they should pay you a small differential for the times you carry the pager outside of normal working hours--like the second or third shift differential paid in some companies. The minute it goes off, and you go on the clock, you should be paid your normal hourly rate, plus overtime if you've already worked your full quota for the day, week, or however it's handled where you are. Your obligation in exchange for that differential is to answer the page in a timely fashion.
Do you need a lawyer? Or do you need to gather information provided by the folks reading Slashdot, who are reporting to you from the trenches, so that you can discuss the issue with your manager in a coherent, low-key fashion?
Cheers,
Annie
While you're dealing with the vibrations, be sure to watch out for the dust -- where you've got one, there's a good chance you'll be dealing with the other.
I wouldn't try to protect the systems in any way -- just keep an eye on their outside cases and be prepared to clean a little more often. I neglected this in an at-home machine several years back while some wallboard was being fixed, and what I found inside after the work was done was a bit alarming. If I'd just dusted the case often with a clean cloth, I could have kept a lot of that dust away from the components.
I hope the construction goes away soon. It's not much fun.
Annie
I'm afraid that mediocrity will be the standard in our schools for a long time to come. It's deplorable, but it's true. Kids who "don't fit the mold" in whatever sense (gifted, physically challenged, "foreign") cause trouble. They force the adults in charge to think, to use their creativity, to respond. Far easier when you're just drawing a paycheck, to focus on the herd at the expense of the troublemakers. And this includes a certain tolerance for bullying.
Our solution to all of this when our boys were younger was to put them in a small private school. In our case, the school was Catholic. Whatever anybody may have to say about Catholic schools in general, at this school the individual kid was respected, parental involvement was more than a spiel, and there was zero tolerance for bullying in any form.
You might look around to see if a similar school is available in your community. The drawback can be the expense, but there are scholarships around, especially for youngsters as talented and bright as Sean seems to be. Failing that, I think you're smart to home-school him. I suspect he's formed his own friendships and associations independent of the school-herd, so socializing shouldn't be an issue.
Above all, console yourselves. In a very few years you'll be rewarded. You'll have an intelligent, capable, mature young man who has a head start in the adult world. So just dig in and hang on.
Annie
(Incidentally, today's news also brings word of the suspension from school of a thirteen-year-old deaf student in New Jersey. Her "crime" was using Sign Language on the schoolbus...)
Easy enough to find out if you are taking a day off and have nothing else to do. I ran the main page through CAST's "Bobby" validator. Sadly, Slashdot flunked. But not by much. The report:
This page does not meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Below is a list of 1 Priority 1 accessibility errors found:
Provide alternative text for all images. (1 instance) Line 16
Not bad by comparison with a lot of what's on the Web -- probably somebody just had an off day, right?
The serious lesson here is that if you want to make your pages accessible, CAST is a good starting place. They will cite you W3 chapter and verse for everything they find. I'm sure there are other Web-based validators around. Good job, Slashdot!
Annie
I'm with you.
About three years ago an acquaintance who worked in a small office asked me to come in and have a look at their server, which was "acting strangely." Nobody could remember the last time the box had been maintained or looked at, though they had been faithfully running weekly backups.
The server was running NetWare 2.15, and as nearly as I could tell, it had been running uninterrupted for a little over eight years -- never rebooted, never maintained. Its 300 megabyte full-height SCSI hard drive (sitting on a DCB, remember those?) was in its death throes. The box itself was a very early 386.
The sad part about it was, I could have restored the whole setup onto a newer box, except that the diskette called "Gendata" was missing from the set. That was a serialized diskette, and at some point somebody had put it away for safekeeping, and it couldn't be found. I offered to contact Novell, thinking they'd be interested in the project for historical amusement if nothing else. But the people in the office decided to upgrade.
That was probably a wise move on their part, but I shut that server down with feelings of nostalgia and regret. They had certainly gotten their money's worth out of it and out of its O/S.
Annie
I knew, but have gotten out of touch with, a man who was blind and worked as a Novell administrator. He also ran a FidoNet BBS, which may tell you just how very long ago it was. The NetWare gave him no problems, because its menus were all text-based. He had a Braille printer which in those days was a fabulously expensive proposition.
What always fascinated me was that in those long-ago days, his preferred o/s for general work, for his BBS, etc. was OS/2. IBM was very responsive to the requirements of users with various disabilities. Microsoft was not, at least not initially. Blind end-users had more than a few Maalox moments when it began to appear that the GUI, in the form of Windows 3.x, was going to prevail in the business world.
I guess things occasionally do get better.
Annie
I'm buying a new one before the month is out. It'll be a Mac. If I was leaning that way before, this decided me.
You can't use hamsters to pull a dogsled because they are tropical animals, and if you take them to the Arctic, they will freeze their little hamster tushies off.
How about snowshoe hares or baby seals?
On the other hand, with the current trends in global warming and projected melting of the polar ice caps, maybe the idea of using hamsters isn't so very far-fetched after all.
Stalin arguably killed more people (perhaps 20 million) during his time in power than Hitler could even dream of -- the crucial difference being that in contrast to the Holocaust, Stalin's killings weren't focused on the eradication of a single people.
From a military standpoint (at least at the time of World War II), one could say with conviction that Hitler was stupid to invade Russia. He diluted his forces (which weren't in the best shape to begin with at that point) and historically, no one had ever successfully invaded Russia.
Why did the people of the Soviet Union allow all of this to go on? The author Boris Pasternak speaks of the Russians' "cursed capacity for suffering," and I think the answer lies there. We can't begin to conceive of how downtrodden and utterly hopeless these people were -- yet still they fought on.
To me it's more interesting to ponder the relationship between the Allies and Josef Stalin. He was needed to win the war, but he certainly could have given Hitler lessons in brutality.
Annie
But be certain you've concluded some kind of arrangement with the donor organization about what's to be done with the real "junkers," the parts that just won't function any more after you've finished your testing/salvaging/rebuilding efforts. There is much in old hardware that is toxic (lead, arsenic, and other unsavory stuff), and you may find that your friendly local landfill or trash guys won't let you throw the stuff away. Without looking a gift horse in the mouth, be certain you've got some way to get rid of the remains. Having done that, best of luck to you! I think you'll find what you're about to undertake is very rewarding. Cheers, Annie
Relax and click around a bit at the site. You'll find a non-Flash version if you look for it, and it's worth seeing. Annie.
Well, hello from the other end of the age spectrum. I have been working in information technologies for over twenty years, most of that time as the sole female in groups of sociopathic, dateless, unfortunate-looking and occasionally un-bathed men. Yes, many of them were pigs (in the tradition of what we've been treated to here in response to your post) and if you forget about it for too long, they'll find a way to remind you. Fortunately, as in other fields of endeavor, there are also nice people around. Seek them out.
If you want to be successful in your chosen field, you'll have to work twice as hard as all of these anonymous cowards and bitter old men, and be twice as intelligent. Fortunately this is not difficult, and you'll probably succeed admirably.
Cheers,
Annie
Dear Troll,
What makes you think that miners are any less intelligent than you are? For generations, young men became miners because there was no other gainful, honest employment available in whatever part of the world they happened to have grown up in. They didn't do it because they were stupid. They did it because economics and reality offered them no other choice.
If devices like this offer a way to save human lives -- not to mention human health -- then that's a good ting. If the devices can begin to eliminate strip mining and the pollution engendered by traditional mining operations, then that's a real bonus.
As for the "young, stupid" miners, I'd suggest you not worry too much about them. We can encourage them all to become software engineers...