Credentials aren't everything. Consider the MCSE, for example. But as a general rule, someone who has documented evidence of study and experience in a field is more credible than someone who doesn't.
Locally, our TV meteorologists are generally worth the title. They carried AMS certifications when it was the exception rather than the rule, and most of them have been here long enough to understand how the local weather patterns behave.
That doesn't mean that I'd blindly accept statistics from them, however. That's not their job, nor is it a requirement for AMA certification. When they need stats, they get them from the regional NOAA office at the airport.
I worked in a shop like that once. Worst job I ever had. Like Bill, I strive to produce tighter, cleaner code rather than sheer bulk product. Only good thing about the whole deal was that I ended up seeing real numbers that demonstrated what amount of time and effort goals were expected to require versus how much time, effort (and lines-of-code) they actually required and that it was pretty consistent no matter who the developer was.
I'm not really impressed about an inventory of 10 million LOC, especially considering that as far as I can tell, QuickBooks cannot export to Excel unless there's an actual copy of Microsoft Excel installed on the same machine as QuickBooks. No love for LibreOffice, no CSV, no Excel-on-some-other-machine. Then there was the eval copy that expired. Apparently the command that you must use to remove it is "FORMAT C:".
You'd think if they had this awesome system that kept a file on every one of us and everything we were searching for, surely that guy would have raised some red flags.
Probably the only thing that keeps us from living in an Orwellian nightmare is the incompetence of government agencies when it comes to actually using the data they've collected. And, related to that, the fact that a lot of the "facts" on file are inaccurate.
Which would be more comforting if it were not that the flip side of that coin is that while the guilty may go free, this same incompetence can impact the innocent.
Innocent people have nothing to hide - the problem is the people who determine what "innocent" is.
Where has freedom gone? Why are we, the governed, so eager to give up our rights or the rights of others. Every single law is a restriction (for better or worse) of someones freedoms. That folks don't understand the difference between freedom and liberty may have something to do with that but is a topic for another day.
I'm afraid we've been giving it away hand over fist.
However, the problem here is that Apple effectively has monopoly powers and we do have a longstanding antipathy to monoplies in this country, in part because monopolies themselves limit freedom. We ask the government to control them because no ordinary individual or group can have influence over them, and, being a monopoly, they have insulated themselves from market forces. In plain English "It's my way or the highway".
Still, Apple is dominant, but not a true monopoly here, and so the best approach is to simply stop slavishly adoring Apple and go out and buy a product that doesn't carry Apple's restrictions. I'm expecting to follow my own advice next time I buy an eReader, since the "big name" vendors are too fond of hiding the books that I allegedly "own" - or even yanking them back.
Maybe I've gotten too far out of the mainstream when it comes to listening sources, but once it drops into rapping, it all becomes mostly monotone anyway. It's why I tend to choke on hearing the term rap "music".
Too much of the rap I hear is murky to the point of intelligibility, and what is intelligible is mere gratuitous nastiness. I have heard some good stuff, so I try to chalk the gunk that is more common these days up to Sturgeon's Law. But a melodic (i.e. non-rap) song with bad lyrics may still make it because it has a catchy melody or some memorable tonal color. When you don't have those to fall back on, you're screwed. About all that remains is rhythm.
Ah, it's no use. YOU YOUNG HOODLUMS! GET OFFA MY LAWN!
Wasn't this inevitable? It's way cheaper for "concept" artists to use tried and true melodies than really break the mold with something new. Who would want to invest in crap like that?
I think George Harrison did that one. Didn't work out too well for him, though. My sweet Lord!
Bloody hell. It's like Linux has heard of the concept of preservation of the species, but wants no part of it.
Java/swing is sounding better all the time.
The good thing about Java/Swing it that it's "write once, run anywhere". A lot of people disdain Swing, but for all its shortcomings, a Swing app doesn't care what what hardware, what OS, or even what window manager is running.
The downside is to run Swing apps, you need a JVM installed and running. Anyone dismissing Java because it's "slow" is living in the 1990s - I've seen and even written highly-performant graphical apps in Swing. But it's a pain in the fundament to have to bring up a JVM to run an app instead of have it launch directly from the OS.
One of the things I like about Cinnamon is that apparently it's much easier to create your own applets than it ever was in Gnome, even when Gnome supported applets.
... you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.
Precisely. Or, in my case, homing in on one of the various decorartions and hotsports (size corners, scrollbars, etc.) will overshoot and bring up the flaming navigator, losing track of the window you were actually working in.
I switched to Cinnamon because in addition to all the fast-access icons on my toolbar, I had lost all of the status displays. Seeing as how Social Networking wasn't one of the things I needed at-a-glance info on.
I switched off Cinnamon's hot corners after I determined that no corner of my screen is safe from having focus yanked from a work window.
Besides, I've always navigated with hot-keys. Less strain on my shoulder tendons than a mouse.
This is the Oracle that writes poorly implemented and poorly documented installers for their weirdly designed (and poorly documented) database software? Still not interested.
Well, if the Windows branding and marketing folks are doing their job right, people won't want to switch systems even if all that changes is the name and logo. People are very tribal in nature, and this effect is very strong; especially if the users have seen many versions of Windows and not much of anything else.
Actually, what enrages most people I know about Windows is that things do change for what appear to be solely marketing reasons. Going from one version of Windows to another is akin to the Gnome3/Unity debacle only for each and every new Windows version.
What name does the "Network Neighborhood" have this week?
Why not use a desktop scanner with a feed tray and process that? Eliminate the need for the fancy camera rig, arduino, legos, etc.
You could still do all the python processing, but it would be far mor efficient and less prone to bugs.
Camera rig? Actually, since I do have quite a few boxes of old punched cards, I've been fighting the impulse to build a Lego+arduino reader myself. Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles is that a standard Hollerith card isn't quite an even number of Legos in height.
On the other hand, my Arduino has 12 input channels, so I could hook up a discrete optical sensor to each one!
Watson turned the job down. Said it didn't pay well enough to deal with idiots all day long.
Actually I have not the faintest idea what IBM is good for these days. Hardly anyone buys mainframes, they don't sell PCs, Linux-based brand-X servers are more than sufficient for most people, CICS and green-screen apps are mostly supplanted by more portable web-based application systems and free-to-inexpensive database servers are rampant.
IBM used to be famous because they allowed managers who were too incompetent to live to keep their jobs by doing all the thinking for them and recommending IBM solutions. Once your solutions are basically Wal-Mart Made In China quality and your support people are speaking unintelligible Bombay Welsh - once you wade through the phone menus and endless waits, where's the benefit? Might as well just install all open-source stuff and depend on user forums. You'll usually get faster, more intelligent response. In fact, I could get better support way back in the mid 90's on Linux than I could from OS/2, and I worked in a Fortune 500 "poster child" IBM shop back then.
And this is why you keep up with technology and continuing to learn in your spare time rather than becoming stagnant. Old age is as much a state of mind as all our inevitable fates.
And this gives you... what?
Not job stability. I average about 2 years ahead of "state of the art" in my town, although sadly, that's not all that difficult. I have just about the same employment longevity as anyone else I know. Even the younger cheaper folks.
I was wondering how the editors even let the other one through as valid news...I think most of us here are pretty aware of PARC and how the gov really was responsible for the foundation of the internet...that said it did very quickly since evolve beyond that.
The Wall Street Journal is now a Murdoch publication, just like Fox News. They don't check facts, they create them.
This is yet another in a long line of alarmist articles about the 'loss of' X or Y in our modern technological culture. What is being missed is that this state of affairs is exactly was Capitalism was meant to bring about, a day when we all have much more leisure time because automation and division of labour has made long hours of back-breaking subsistence working obsolete. What we should be asking is not 'how do we go back to hard work with our hands?' but how do we transition to a new model (a post recession model) which acknowledges that there is no viable reason for people to need to be working 40+ hours a week. We can then realise that we can work with our hands, enjoy DIY and reconnect with the land in a way that is about personal growth, community and coexistence, instead of commerce, because commerce takes less and less work to keep running. It's not a hippy dream, or a Socialist agenda, it's actually the victory of the Capitalist model being unable to see it's own success clear enough to embrace it yet.
Spare me the religion. Capitalism is about leveraging Capital. That's it. Anything else is incidental. Certainly it wasn't brought about to provide a 40-hour work week or leisure time. Go back and read what some of the 19th century capitalists had to say about giving workers Saturdays off so that they could spend time in sloth, idleness, depravity and beer-drinking. Hmmm.
Making Capitalism out to be a purely benevolent force is no more realistic than saying that all rain is good and just as mindlessly simplistic as saying that all Socialism is evil. Or that a single bed fits all people.
Actually, cops are my friend. They took care of rather terrible neighbors across the street, they provide escorts for me when I'm on a run with a rather popular motorcycle club that fights the westboro baptist church, and I get thanked and a hand shake quite often.
It's all a matter of who you are and what you do. Law abiding citizens that work to help the community have nothing to fear from Uncle Leo.
A long time ago, Clarence Darrow once reportedly declared that the law being what it is, he could find something to prosecute a ham sandwich on and get a conviction.
Or more recently, in the words of Terry Pratchett's favorite cop, Samuel Vimes, "the question isn't whether or not they're guilty of a crime. They're ALL guilty. The only question is what they're guilty of".
I have a lot of sympathy for policemen. Before our Brave Free Land made it illegal to listen to police radio, most of the people I heard them called to seemed to be either drunk, crazy, or both.
But I've also seen them train at the local academy, acting more like a military force than as Peace Officers. A very definite "Us versus Them" mindset.
Police can be your allies, don't automatically consider them as friends.
100 years ago 90% of the people in the US were employed on farms. today its 4%. why isn't 90% of the USA unemployed?
new jobs open up and are created
You make it sound like the farmers all got bored and moved to the city and magically jobs appeared for them.
In reality, factories opened up, started hiring, and farmers left the farms to work under safer (relatively speaking) conditions and at better pay. Which they could do because those self-same factories were producing - among other things - equipment and chemicals that made it possible for the remaining farmers to run the farm with fewer people and still produce affordable - nay, cheaper - foodstuffs. We pay a lot less of our income percentage-wise than people did back then for the essentials.
It was a 2-sided equation. If you want to see what a one-sided equation looks like, consider Trickle-down Economics.
Producing goods with higher efficiency is itself a benefit. That's why our work day is now 8 hours, instead of 12. And if things keep going at their current rate, it may soon be 6. Maybe 4. Actually it would probably make more sense to shorten the week, but you get the idea.
Last I heard, it was because all those damn deadbeat Commie Socialist Union Thugs agitated for a 40-hour work week.
But we fooled them. We got rid of most of the unions, made people exempt, and set them to work 9+ hours a day.
You want a shorter week? They offer that, too. 4-day week, 10 hours a day. Plus unpaid overtime.
If you're interested mostly in calling/texting/emailing then a small screen is fine. But web browsing/book reading/video chat/movie watching are *much* better on a larger screen. Some people prefer to split these activities between a smallish (smart)phone and a tablet, but others (including myself) who only want one device prefer a largish smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S3 in my case, with a 4.8" 720p screen).
It's all just a question of which trade-offs are best for you - why complain that other people have different preferences?
They're welcome to their choices. Myself, I'd rather use a tablet for that kind of stuff. I think the Nook tablet may actually weigh LESS than some smartphones and you don't have to keep it wired to an electrical generator all the time.
I do read books on my phone sometimes, but the phone fits in my pocket and is light enough not to rip out the stitches. That's what I chose.
Slashdot Mirror
Credentials aren't everything. Consider the MCSE, for example. But as a general rule, someone who has documented evidence of study and experience in a field is more credible than someone who doesn't.
Locally, our TV meteorologists are generally worth the title. They carried AMS certifications when it was the exception rather than the rule, and most of them have been here long enough to understand how the local weather patterns behave.
That doesn't mean that I'd blindly accept statistics from them, however. That's not their job, nor is it a requirement for AMA certification. When they need stats, they get them from the regional NOAA office at the airport.
I worked in a shop like that once. Worst job I ever had. Like Bill, I strive to produce tighter, cleaner code rather than sheer bulk product. Only good thing about the whole deal was that I ended up seeing real numbers that demonstrated what amount of time and effort goals were expected to require versus how much time, effort (and lines-of-code) they actually required and that it was pretty consistent no matter who the developer was.
I'm not really impressed about an inventory of 10 million LOC, especially considering that as far as I can tell, QuickBooks cannot export to Excel unless there's an actual copy of Microsoft Excel installed on the same machine as QuickBooks. No love for LibreOffice, no CSV, no Excel-on-some-other-machine. Then there was the eval copy that expired. Apparently the command that you must use to remove it is "FORMAT C:".
You'd think if they had this awesome system that kept a file on every one of us and everything we were searching for, surely that guy would have raised some red flags.
Probably the only thing that keeps us from living in an Orwellian nightmare is the incompetence of government agencies when it comes to actually using the data they've collected. And, related to that, the fact that a lot of the "facts" on file are inaccurate.
Which would be more comforting if it were not that the flip side of that coin is that while the guilty may go free, this same incompetence can impact the innocent.
Innocent people have nothing to hide - the problem is the people who determine what "innocent" is.
Where has freedom gone? Why are we, the governed, so eager to give up our rights or the rights of others. Every single law is a restriction (for better or worse) of someones freedoms. That folks don't understand the difference between freedom and liberty may have something to do with that but is a topic for another day.
I'm afraid we've been giving it away hand over fist.
However, the problem here is that Apple effectively has monopoly powers and we do have a longstanding antipathy to monoplies in this country, in part because monopolies themselves limit freedom. We ask the government to control them because no ordinary individual or group can have influence over them, and, being a monopoly, they have insulated themselves from market forces. In plain English "It's my way or the highway".
Still, Apple is dominant, but not a true monopoly here, and so the best approach is to simply stop slavishly adoring Apple and go out and buy a product that doesn't carry Apple's restrictions. I'm expecting to follow my own advice next time I buy an eReader, since the "big name" vendors are too fond of hiding the books that I allegedly "own" - or even yanking them back.
Maybe I've gotten too far out of the mainstream when it comes to listening sources, but once it drops into rapping, it all becomes mostly monotone anyway. It's why I tend to choke on hearing the term rap "music".
Too much of the rap I hear is murky to the point of intelligibility, and what is intelligible is mere gratuitous nastiness. I have heard some good stuff, so I try to chalk the gunk that is more common these days up to Sturgeon's Law. But a melodic (i.e. non-rap) song with bad lyrics may still make it because it has a catchy melody or some memorable tonal color. When you don't have those to fall back on, you're screwed. About all that remains is rhythm.
Ah, it's no use. YOU YOUNG HOODLUMS! GET OFFA MY LAWN!
Wasn't this inevitable? It's way cheaper for "concept" artists to use tried and true melodies than really break the mold with something new. Who would want to invest in crap like that?
I think George Harrison did that one. Didn't work out too well for him, though. My sweet Lord!
Answer hazy. Try again later.
Bloody hell. It's like Linux has heard of the concept of preservation of the species, but wants no part of it.
Java/swing is sounding better all the time.
The good thing about Java/Swing it that it's "write once, run anywhere". A lot of people disdain Swing, but for all its shortcomings, a Swing app doesn't care what what hardware, what OS, or even what window manager is running.
The downside is to run Swing apps, you need a JVM installed and running. Anyone dismissing Java because it's "slow" is living in the 1990s - I've seen and even written highly-performant graphical apps in Swing. But it's a pain in the fundament to have to bring up a JVM to run an app instead of have it launch directly from the OS.
One of the things I like about Cinnamon is that apparently it's much easier to create your own applets than it ever was in Gnome, even when Gnome supported applets.
"Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2."
I can.
I will. It's worse. Much worse.
Silly gratuitous changes and overblown eye candy are one thing. Yanking critical day-to-day, minute-to-minute functionality, however, is intolerable.
... you don't have to click the word "Activities" at all. It's a hot corner. You're supposed shoot your mouse to it quickly. And the beauty of the hot corner is, you don't have to look for it or locate it on the screen, you don't have to aim for it or click it - you just whip your cursor up to it in a fast, imprecise motion - and voila - you have the overview. The targets there are also large, so you can don't have to be precise.
Precisely. Or, in my case, homing in on one of the various decorartions and hotsports (size corners, scrollbars, etc.) will overshoot and bring up the flaming navigator, losing track of the window you were actually working in.
I switched to Cinnamon because in addition to all the fast-access icons on my toolbar, I had lost all of the status displays. Seeing as how Social Networking wasn't one of the things I needed at-a-glance info on.
I switched off Cinnamon's hot corners after I determined that no corner of my screen is safe from having focus yanked from a work window.
Besides, I've always navigated with hot-keys. Less strain on my shoulder tendons than a mouse.
This is the Oracle that writes poorly implemented and poorly documented installers for their weirdly designed (and poorly documented) database software? Still not interested.
But. But. But... It's unBREAKable!
Well, if the Windows branding and marketing folks are doing their job right, people won't want to switch systems even if all that changes is the name and logo. People are very tribal in nature, and this effect is very strong; especially if the users have seen many versions of Windows and not much of anything else.
Actually, what enrages most people I know about Windows is that things do change for what appear to be solely marketing reasons. Going from one version of Windows to another is akin to the Gnome3/Unity debacle only for each and every new Windows version.
What name does the "Network Neighborhood" have this week?
Why not use a desktop scanner with a feed tray and process that? Eliminate the need for the fancy camera rig, arduino, legos, etc.
You could still do all the python processing, but it would be far mor efficient and less prone to bugs.
Camera rig? Actually, since I do have quite a few boxes of old punched cards, I've been fighting the impulse to build a Lego+arduino reader myself. Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles is that a standard Hollerith card isn't quite an even number of Legos in height.
On the other hand, my Arduino has 12 input channels, so I could hook up a discrete optical sensor to each one!
Watson turned the job down. Said it didn't pay well enough to deal with idiots all day long.
Actually I have not the faintest idea what IBM is good for these days. Hardly anyone buys mainframes, they don't sell PCs, Linux-based brand-X servers are more than sufficient for most people, CICS and green-screen apps are mostly supplanted by more portable web-based application systems and free-to-inexpensive database servers are rampant.
IBM used to be famous because they allowed managers who were too incompetent to live to keep their jobs by doing all the thinking for them and recommending IBM solutions. Once your solutions are basically Wal-Mart Made In China quality and your support people are speaking unintelligible Bombay Welsh - once you wade through the phone menus and endless waits, where's the benefit? Might as well just install all open-source stuff and depend on user forums. You'll usually get faster, more intelligent response. In fact, I could get better support way back in the mid 90's on Linux than I could from OS/2, and I worked in a Fortune 500 "poster child" IBM shop back then.
And this is why you keep up with technology and continuing to learn in your spare time rather than becoming stagnant. Old age is as much a state of mind as all our inevitable fates.
And this gives you ... what?
Not job stability. I average about 2 years ahead of "state of the art" in my town, although sadly, that's not all that difficult. I have just about the same employment longevity as anyone else I know. Even the younger cheaper folks.
I was wondering how the editors even let the other one through as valid news...I think most of us here are pretty aware of PARC and how the gov really was responsible for the foundation of the internet...that said it did very quickly since evolve beyond that.
The Wall Street Journal is now a Murdoch publication, just like Fox News. They don't check facts, they create them.
This is yet another in a long line of alarmist articles about the 'loss of' X or Y in our modern technological culture. What is being missed is that this state of affairs is exactly was Capitalism was meant to bring about, a day when we all have much more leisure time because automation and division of labour has made long hours of back-breaking subsistence working obsolete. What we should be asking is not 'how do we go back to hard work with our hands?' but how do we transition to a new model (a post recession model) which acknowledges that there is no viable reason for people to need to be working 40+ hours a week. We can then realise that we can work with our hands, enjoy DIY and reconnect with the land in a way that is about personal growth, community and coexistence, instead of commerce, because commerce takes less and less work to keep running. It's not a hippy dream, or a Socialist agenda, it's actually the victory of the Capitalist model being unable to see it's own success clear enough to embrace it yet.
Spare me the religion. Capitalism is about leveraging Capital. That's it. Anything else is incidental. Certainly it wasn't brought about to provide a 40-hour work week or leisure time. Go back and read what some of the 19th century capitalists had to say about giving workers Saturdays off so that they could spend time in sloth, idleness, depravity and beer-drinking. Hmmm.
Making Capitalism out to be a purely benevolent force is no more realistic than saying that all rain is good and just as mindlessly simplistic as saying that all Socialism is evil. Or that a single bed fits all people.
Actually, cops are my friend. They took care of rather terrible neighbors across the street, they provide escorts for me when I'm on a run with a rather popular motorcycle club that fights the westboro baptist church, and I get thanked and a hand shake quite often.
It's all a matter of who you are and what you do. Law abiding citizens that work to help the community have nothing to fear from Uncle Leo.
A long time ago, Clarence Darrow once reportedly declared that the law being what it is, he could find something to prosecute a ham sandwich on and get a conviction.
Or more recently, in the words of Terry Pratchett's favorite cop, Samuel Vimes, "the question isn't whether or not they're guilty of a crime. They're ALL guilty. The only question is what they're guilty of".
I have a lot of sympathy for policemen. Before our Brave Free Land made it illegal to listen to police radio, most of the people I heard them called to seemed to be either drunk, crazy, or both.
But I've also seen them train at the local academy, acting more like a military force than as Peace Officers. A very definite "Us versus Them" mindset.
Police can be your allies, don't automatically consider them as friends.
I cried a little when I heard she died.
Then I read about her having a "partner" and cried a little more. I would have loved to have her fly me to the moon. Dang.
100 years ago 90% of the people in the US were employed on farms. today its 4%. why isn't 90% of the USA unemployed?
new jobs open up and are created
You make it sound like the farmers all got bored and moved to the city and magically jobs appeared for them.
In reality, factories opened up, started hiring, and farmers left the farms to work under safer (relatively speaking) conditions and at better pay. Which they could do because those self-same factories were producing - among other things - equipment and chemicals that made it possible for the remaining farmers to run the farm with fewer people and still produce affordable - nay, cheaper - foodstuffs. We pay a lot less of our income percentage-wise than people did back then for the essentials.
It was a 2-sided equation. If you want to see what a one-sided equation looks like, consider Trickle-down Economics.
Perhaps I'll believe it when I see products that say "Made in USA" on the bottom. For now, i'll keep my weary cynicism.
You'll just have to program your Home Fabricator[TM] to do that while it's printing out all your furniture, clothing, etc.
Producing goods with higher efficiency is itself a benefit. That's why our work day is now 8 hours, instead of 12. And if things keep going at their current rate, it may soon be 6. Maybe 4. Actually it would probably make more sense to shorten the week, but you get the idea.
Last I heard, it was because all those damn deadbeat Commie Socialist Union Thugs agitated for a 40-hour work week.
But we fooled them. We got rid of most of the unions, made people exempt, and set them to work 9+ hours a day.
You want a shorter week? They offer that, too. 4-day week, 10 hours a day. Plus unpaid overtime.
Which industry/country do you work in, where on-call time is free (and possibly compulsory and/or unlimited)?
The United States of America. Pick an industry - it probably applies.
If you're interested mostly in calling/texting/emailing then a small screen is fine. But web browsing/book reading/video chat/movie watching are *much* better on a larger screen. Some people prefer to split these activities between a smallish (smart)phone and a tablet, but others (including myself) who only want one device prefer a largish smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S3 in my case, with a 4.8" 720p screen).
It's all just a question of which trade-offs are best for you - why complain that other people have different preferences?
They're welcome to their choices. Myself, I'd rather use a tablet for that kind of stuff. I think the Nook tablet may actually weigh LESS than some smartphones and you don't have to keep it wired to an electrical generator all the time.
I do read books on my phone sometimes, but the phone fits in my pocket and is light enough not to rip out the stitches. That's what I chose.