Re:a "living" language is potentially dangerous...
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 1
I would like to retain the correct meaning of "ironic" in the social consciousness too, but it just isn't possible. Look at the absurd things France tries to do to control their language and you see how futile it is. Personally, I wish I could refer to a person as having a discriminating personality (which used to be a compliment), but the meaning of the word "discriminate" has been reformed. Oh well, what can we do?
I know several "office professionals" that restore old cars, tool around on their boat (that they fixed up themselves), do their own home repairs and improvements, etc.
I do too. One of them is me, but then I think we are talking about what you do for 40+ hours a week professionally. All I'm saying (poorly, I'll add, because I seem to cause more confusion with each post) is that I think it is a bad career move for a professional to do manual labor between jobs.
(for the record, I don't have anything against manual laborers)
Get off your high horse, and thank the people who support the infrastructure you couldn't live without.
You will be happy to know that I not only thank my painter and have referred him to others. I actually do respect his talent and have learned good things from him. I just don't want to talk like him in my next job interview, so I won't be taking a side job doing painting any time soon.
I'm getting a lot of flack from people who once painted a fence or layed a brick. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put down manual labor. Society needs a diverse labor pool, including manual labor. I just think it is a bad idea for professionals to do manual labor between professional jobs.
As an example, do you think that a lawyer or banker would do roofing or construction between jobs? Of course not, and if they did, I can guarantee you that they will avoid talking about it in their next professional interview. Why? Because they know that it is a bad move to step outside of the professional circle. People start to question if you are really "in" the club.
I'm not telling anyone to like the world we live in. I'm just calling it as I see it.
You bring up some good points, and I probably should have stated the standard disclaimer about exceptions to the rule, but I still think I bring up a valid concern. People operate in social groups and there isn't a lot of mobility outside of those groups. It simply makes sense that by doing your best to keep within professional circles you will stand a better chance of hearing about future work that interests you. Work for the construction company and you will find out about all sorts of other common labor opportunities.
Seriously, no offense was intended. I think I'm just observing a social dynamic and offering a warning about the downside to taking a blue collar job.
This may sound pompous, but I disagree about doing manual labor. Have you spent much time listening to the way most manual laborers talk and present themselves? If you think you can be around that without picking up some bad habits (grammar, cursing and general dialect) you are probably wrong. We are social beings, and it is natural to pick up habits from those we are around.
In my opinion, language discrimination is one of the most common forms that holds people back. You never know if you got passed over for an interview because on the phone you sounded like a construction worker or a poor person. No matter how unfair it may be, the bottom line is that people who talk and act like professionals generally want their own kind in their midst.
Therefore, construction or any blue collar work is the last thing I would do if I had any intention of getting back into professional work long term.
For what it is worth, I did a cursory walk through the site and used their search tool to find information on the dead sea scrolls, but must have missed it. I'll keep looking, but before I go down a rabbit hole, are you by chance making some sort of statement to the effect that I'm intolerant because the "insightful" parent to my post contradicted everything I've heard before?
Usually a post moderated "insightful" will have some specific examples to substantiate the claim. I am legitamately interested to know, because up until now all I've ever heard about the dead sea scrolls is that they have been remarkebly accurate. Mind you, I can't read the scrolls and I'm no biblical scholar, but I'm curious how you came upon this conclusion.
At a Federal site I worked at, we used PeopleSoft on Oracle and Solaris. From everything I heard there, nobody runs PeopleSoft on Windows unless it is the development client or a test system. That was two years ago and I could have heard a biased opinion, but my impression was that Microsoft is still playing catchup in the ERP realm.
For the love of God, please punish idiots who leave their phones on. I hope you are asking these rude people to leave the classroom when they receive a call. I can't believe the nerve of some people.
I'm not willing to bet the future of email on the chance that every two-bit swindler will arrive at the conclusion you lay out. Sure, after sending 500 million spam messages he or she may throw in the towell, but by then the damage is done.
As a medium of communication Email is seriously threatened by spam. I used to swear by it, but these days if I really need to communicate I make sure that someone also knows my phone number. When I'm distributing my resume (to employers... don't worry, I'm not spamming it) I fear that my spam filter will be too agressive. I'm certainly not in the minority, and I hate how spammers are ruining my preferred communication medium.
Although their business model is crappy, I don't think spam is going away on its own accord. My preference is an intelligent technical solution. (for the record, I've used nearly every filtering technique and am about to go the whitelist route)
This might be urban legend, but I thought it sounded like fun. Should you ever get caught shoplifting or something like that at a retail establishment, before you leave, ask them for an application for employment. Most likely whoever is intimidating you in the back room will tell you to screw off, in which case you have grounds to sue them for refusing to give you an application.
Anyone ever heard of anything like this? I can't see myself getting the chance to test it out, but I could this being a good tactic for motivated protesters & whatnot.
I lived in Washington DC for three years and their traffic lights are controlled so that motorcades of officials can geta round the city more effectively. They also setup up police blockades for security, and it is generally a pain to the residents, but it works pretty well. In addition, after 9/11 they modified the system to make mass evacuation more effective. In a nutshell, less light changes and longer durations of red/green work better for evacuation.
I have experiemented with translucent terminals in Mac OS X and found that things are less readable on the whole. Maybe the trick is in the user interface. Since I often find myself minimizing, hiding or otherwize moving a terminal window out of the way, maybe the solution is to have a key combination that makes an app window translucent while they key is held down? This might be more useful to me.
I can't comment on a comparison to GoF, as I haven't read it yet, but I am starting to read EJB Design Patterns. I would say that PoEAA is a little more theoretical since it doesn't deal with one framework (EJB). Marinescu's book is ideal for specific advice on using EJB.
Incidentally, before reading Fowler's book I was a proponent of EJB, however he offers some good critiques of EJB in the book.
There is simply too much momentum behind the relational approach. Organizations don't want to pay for another product or train existing DBAs and developers to another datastore.
Although persisting objects to an OODB is simple and trivial, trying to make sense of the data isn't so easy. From what I've heard, a lot of the semantics of SQL don't work with an OODB.
Some people think that OO languages are a fad or at least the database will outlive the language. Some are wary to bind the db and language too closely. There may be some clever solutions to this problem, but I get the impression that DBAs from the relational camp are wary of an OODB in the way that we may prefer a text file over a binary Word document.
There are some interesting ideas coming about to deal with the issue. For Java I'm familiar with JDO (java data objects) as a transparent way of storing objects in a relational database. I'm eager to see how well it works in practice.
Sorry if it seemed a little brief. I was doing the balancing act and figured my summary of a pattern would most definitely do it injustice and bring about dozens of critiques on my summary.;) That said, I'll give an example of two patterns that I put to practice with good results:
Serialized LOB - If certain data is stored in the database, but it doesn't change often (or when it changes you drop & recreate) it makes sense to store the data as a binary large object or a character large object. I chose the latter and stored my XML documents as CLOBs. My intuition said that this was appropriate for my needs, but Fowler described it in a way that assured me I was on the right track.
Identity Map - Use a Map data structure to keep track of objects that are expensive to load from the database and first try to retrieve the object from the Map. In the above situation, when reading an XML CLOB from the database, I put it into the identity map and future requests were several times faster. It didn't take long at all, and it was a nice optimization.
Okay, these may not be really impressive, but the ideas were fairly new to me.
I think the biggest barrier isn't qualification and intelligence, although there may be some truth to what you say. I don't know for sure one way or the other, but I do know that it is a pain to coordinate software with someone who is 10 hours ahead of you. I suppose they could work third shift, but even so, most people have a difficult time collaborating over long distances.
In my opinion the larger risk is that foreign companies have access to a local, affordable and competent workforce that could kick our butts. While the parent thread worries about the health of IT jobs, I think the larger risk is faced by American IT companies. It could get interesting.
Has anyone else had experience with such a test, especially as the sole means of determining a candidate suitable for a job?
What makes you think this is the sole reason? It is simply a pre-condition, like a degree or exposure to certain technologies or industries. If a company knows that a certain personality from the meyers-briggs (for example) test works best on their team, and they have an abundance of applicants, can you blame them? Talent and skill are important, but if you've worked on a team with the odd guy you know how important team dynamics are. Whether this test can really acertain personality for them is another matter and I'm not really qualified to judge.
Btw, I'm also in the job market, so I feel your pain. It sucks, but for all you know this company did you a favor.
Oh, come on. Just because Java needs things to be in a class and method doesn't mean the operation of sorting an array of strings isn't a one-liner. Heck, even a Perl script should be a minimum of two lines, one to declare the location of the interpreter and another for the one-liner.
I suspect the cycle of check-in, check-out, compile is no worse that transfer-files, compile.
I'm no cvs expert, but I quasi-admin the CVS setup at my workplace (small team of developers) and we operate by the rule of only checking in code that compiles and for the most part works right. In this way, all check-ins should be bug fixes or enhancements. This makes the log handy to see the evolution of the code.
If the log was riddled with "testing on the windoze box" entries I think it would pollute the log. If I were this guy I would solve this by using Samba to mount a drive on the windows machine and operate on one location for the source. That wouldn't preclude CVS for its proper use.
Having skipped arson 101, could someone tell me what happens when you mix gasoline and soap and light it? I'm guessing that the soap increases the viscosity and that the explosion throws globs of burning peices. Can someone elaborate? I'm curious (in a scientific, rather than evil-doer way).
I don't think your logic holds up very well. I don't want the government imposing capricious taxes because some merchant gives a good bargain. The thought of someone coming in and effectively adding a tax to make sure that my prices are commensurately high with my service sounds pretty invasive.
I don't see anything wrong with the current Internet shopping model, which gives convenience, selection and good price. That is progress, indeed. For the government to swoop down and "fix" the situation does nobody any good.
As for the tax itself, I think we could all see this coming some day. The part that ticks me off the most is that mail order catalogs are exempt. I don't see the difference between these businesses.
This is all interesting information, but it doesn't sound like he really learned anything. He still advocates illegal activity and seems oblivious to the basic idea of penal theory.
How many times must the guy say "I did the wrong thing and deserved to be punished for it" until you think he learned something? I thought he brought up some very good points about how he was denied his consitutional rights. There is nothing in the consitution which gives a judge the right to trample someone's right just because he or she is ignorant about the specifics of the case.
I know it isn't a perfect solution, but I only launch IE for a few pissant sites that require it. I've nearly forgotten about the hostilities of the Internet since switching to Mozilla.
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I would like to retain the correct meaning of "ironic" in the social consciousness too, but it just isn't possible. Look at the absurd things France tries to do to control their language and you see how futile it is. Personally, I wish I could refer to a person as having a discriminating personality (which used to be a compliment), but the meaning of the word "discriminate" has been reformed. Oh well, what can we do?
I know several "office professionals" that restore old cars, tool around on their boat (that they fixed up themselves), do their own home repairs and improvements, etc.
I do too. One of them is me, but then I think we are talking about what you do for 40+ hours a week professionally. All I'm saying (poorly, I'll add, because I seem to cause more confusion with each post) is that I think it is a bad career move for a professional to do manual labor between jobs.
(for the record, I don't have anything against manual laborers)
Get off your high horse, and thank the people who support the infrastructure you couldn't live without.
You will be happy to know that I not only thank my painter and have referred him to others. I actually do respect his talent and have learned good things from him. I just don't want to talk like him in my next job interview, so I won't be taking a side job doing painting any time soon.
I'm getting a lot of flack from people who once painted a fence or layed a brick. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put down manual labor. Society needs a diverse labor pool, including manual labor. I just think it is a bad idea for professionals to do manual labor between professional jobs.
As an example, do you think that a lawyer or banker would do roofing or construction between jobs? Of course not, and if they did, I can guarantee you that they will avoid talking about it in their next professional interview. Why? Because they know that it is a bad move to step outside of the professional circle. People start to question if you are really "in" the club.
I'm not telling anyone to like the world we live in. I'm just calling it as I see it.
You bring up some good points, and I probably should have stated the standard disclaimer about exceptions to the rule, but I still think I bring up a valid concern. People operate in social groups and there isn't a lot of mobility outside of those groups. It simply makes sense that by doing your best to keep within professional circles you will stand a better chance of hearing about future work that interests you. Work for the construction company and you will find out about all sorts of other common labor opportunities.
Seriously, no offense was intended. I think I'm just observing a social dynamic and offering a warning about the downside to taking a blue collar job.
This may sound pompous, but I disagree about doing manual labor. Have you spent much time listening to the way most manual laborers talk and present themselves? If you think you can be around that without picking up some bad habits (grammar, cursing and general dialect) you are probably wrong. We are social beings, and it is natural to pick up habits from those we are around.
In my opinion, language discrimination is one of the most common forms that holds people back. You never know if you got passed over for an interview because on the phone you sounded like a construction worker or a poor person. No matter how unfair it may be, the bottom line is that people who talk and act like professionals generally want their own kind in their midst.
Therefore, construction or any blue collar work is the last thing I would do if I had any intention of getting back into professional work long term.
For what it is worth, I did a cursory walk through the site and used their search tool to find information on the dead sea scrolls, but must have missed it. I'll keep looking, but before I go down a rabbit hole, are you by chance making some sort of statement to the effect that I'm intolerant because the "insightful" parent to my post contradicted everything I've heard before?
Usually a post moderated "insightful" will have some specific examples to substantiate the claim. I am legitamately interested to know, because up until now all I've ever heard about the dead sea scrolls is that they have been remarkebly accurate. Mind you, I can't read the scrolls and I'm no biblical scholar, but I'm curious how you came upon this conclusion.
At a Federal site I worked at, we used PeopleSoft on Oracle and Solaris. From everything I heard there, nobody runs PeopleSoft on Windows unless it is the development client or a test system. That was two years ago and I could have heard a biased opinion, but my impression was that Microsoft is still playing catchup in the ERP realm.
For the love of God, please punish idiots who leave their phones on. I hope you are asking these rude people to leave the classroom when they receive a call. I can't believe the nerve of some people.
I'm not willing to bet the future of email on the chance that every two-bit swindler will arrive at the conclusion you lay out. Sure, after sending 500 million spam messages he or she may throw in the towell, but by then the damage is done.
As a medium of communication Email is seriously threatened by spam. I used to swear by it, but these days if I really need to communicate I make sure that someone also knows my phone number. When I'm distributing my resume (to employers... don't worry, I'm not spamming it) I fear that my spam filter will be too agressive. I'm certainly not in the minority, and I hate how spammers are ruining my preferred communication medium.
Although their business model is crappy, I don't think spam is going away on its own accord. My preference is an intelligent technical solution. (for the record, I've used nearly every filtering technique and am about to go the whitelist route)
This might be urban legend, but I thought it sounded like fun. Should you ever get caught shoplifting or something like that at a retail establishment, before you leave, ask them for an application for employment. Most likely whoever is intimidating you in the back room will tell you to screw off, in which case you have grounds to sue them for refusing to give you an application.
Anyone ever heard of anything like this? I can't see myself getting the chance to test it out, but I could this being a good tactic for motivated protesters & whatnot.
I lived in Washington DC for three years and their traffic lights are controlled so that motorcades of officials can geta round the city more effectively. They also setup up police blockades for security, and it is generally a pain to the residents, but it works pretty well. In addition, after 9/11 they modified the system to make mass evacuation more effective. In a nutshell, less light changes and longer durations of red/green work better for evacuation.
I have experiemented with translucent terminals in Mac OS X and found that things are less readable on the whole. Maybe the trick is in the user interface. Since I often find myself minimizing, hiding or otherwize moving a terminal window out of the way, maybe the solution is to have a key combination that makes an app window translucent while they key is held down? This might be more useful to me.
I can't comment on a comparison to GoF, as I haven't read it yet, but I am starting to read EJB Design Patterns. I would say that PoEAA is a little more theoretical since it doesn't deal with one framework (EJB). Marinescu's book is ideal for specific advice on using EJB.
Incidentally, before reading Fowler's book I was a proponent of EJB, however he offers some good critiques of EJB in the book.
There are some interesting ideas coming about to deal with the issue. For Java I'm familiar with JDO (java data objects) as a transparent way of storing objects in a relational database. I'm eager to see how well it works in practice.
Okay, these may not be really impressive, but the ideas were fairly new to me.
I think the biggest barrier isn't qualification and intelligence, although there may be some truth to what you say. I don't know for sure one way or the other, but I do know that it is a pain to coordinate software with someone who is 10 hours ahead of you. I suppose they could work third shift, but even so, most people have a difficult time collaborating over long distances.
In my opinion the larger risk is that foreign companies have access to a local, affordable and competent workforce that could kick our butts. While the parent thread worries about the health of IT jobs, I think the larger risk is faced by American IT companies. It could get interesting.
Has anyone else had experience with such a test, especially as the sole means of determining a candidate suitable for a job?
What makes you think this is the sole reason? It is simply a pre-condition, like a degree or exposure to certain technologies or industries. If a company knows that a certain personality from the meyers-briggs (for example) test works best on their team, and they have an abundance of applicants, can you blame them? Talent and skill are important, but if you've worked on a team with the odd guy you know how important team dynamics are. Whether this test can really acertain personality for them is another matter and I'm not really qualified to judge.
Btw, I'm also in the job market, so I feel your pain. It sucks, but for all you know this company did you a favor.
Oh, come on. Just because Java needs things to be in a class and method doesn't mean the operation of sorting an array of strings isn't a one-liner. Heck, even a Perl script should be a minimum of two lines, one to declare the location of the interpreter and another for the one-liner.
Well, if the "list" of strings is in an array, I would simply use the Java Collections API:
Arrays.sort(mylist);
One line. No fuss.
I suspect the cycle of check-in, check-out, compile is no worse that transfer-files, compile.
I'm no cvs expert, but I quasi-admin the CVS setup at my workplace (small team of developers) and we operate by the rule of only checking in code that compiles and for the most part works right. In this way, all check-ins should be bug fixes or enhancements. This makes the log handy to see the evolution of the code.
If the log was riddled with "testing on the windoze box" entries I think it would pollute the log. If I were this guy I would solve this by using Samba to mount a drive on the windows machine and operate on one location for the source. That wouldn't preclude CVS for its proper use.
Having skipped arson 101, could someone tell me what happens when you mix gasoline and soap and light it? I'm guessing that the soap increases the viscosity and that the explosion throws globs of burning peices. Can someone elaborate? I'm curious (in a scientific, rather than evil-doer way).
I don't think your logic holds up very well. I don't want the government imposing capricious taxes because some merchant gives a good bargain. The thought of someone coming in and effectively adding a tax to make sure that my prices are commensurately high with my service sounds pretty invasive.
I don't see anything wrong with the current Internet shopping model, which gives convenience, selection and good price. That is progress, indeed. For the government to swoop down and "fix" the situation does nobody any good.
As for the tax itself, I think we could all see this coming some day. The part that ticks me off the most is that mail order catalogs are exempt. I don't see the difference between these businesses.
This is all interesting information, but it doesn't sound like he really learned anything. He still advocates illegal activity and seems oblivious to the basic idea of penal theory.
How many times must the guy say "I did the wrong thing and deserved to be punished for it" until you think he learned something? I thought he brought up some very good points about how he was denied his consitutional rights. There is nothing in the consitution which gives a judge the right to trample someone's right just because he or she is ignorant about the specifics of the case.
I know it isn't a perfect solution, but I only launch IE for a few pissant sites that require it. I've nearly forgotten about the hostilities of the Internet since switching to Mozilla.