Yeah, the pay's not great, but here at least are a few of the perks, at least at my school.
Lots and lots of different things to do. I've worked with everyone from physicists to ancient Greek profs.
Imagination counts. Try to figure out new ways to teach old concepts.
Your choice of tools. Learn whatever you want if you can justify it. Just today I've done work with PHP/MySQL, Flash Actionscript, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro.
Fun toys for the asking. Already told my boss I'm getting a dual-G5 and a top of the line PC desktop soon. She knows I'll actually use them.
A technically clued boss who will support my decisions if I can justify them. (No, we're not going to pay for Blackboard/WebCT when I can install an Open Source CMS.)
Very few night/weekends needed, not on call.
Very flexible vacation/timeoff policies.
It's not perfect by any means. Pay and benefits lag industry, there's some scut work, and I'd really like to get back to teaching students instead of faculty, but it's got some pretty nice bennies.
Whenever I read these sorts of narratives about Columbia, I'm always sitting there unconsiously thinking "Come on, a few more minutes. Hold together just a bit longer." Even when I know the exact times of breakup, it doesn't matter, I still think it.
How about taking a tank across a desert in 110 degree weather, being coated in powdery dust from the tanks in front of you to the point of having breathing problems, with the stench of 4 people who haven't had a shower in a week jammed in a space the size of a closet. Add to that the constant physical danger inside a tank, (I've had friends nearly killed through a second's inattention) the little sleep you get is jammed into a clear space on the back deck, lousy food, the constant hammering of the thermal sight fridge and occasional noises that top the jet engine listed above.
Infantry have it even worse: we've at least got the beast to haul our stuff.
And that was peacetime. I was never shot at: feel for the folks on the front lines. They're doing a shitty job for almost no pay and they might come home in pieces.
There is no Politics-Free company out there that always spends money on the right stuff, never spends money on the wrong stuff, runs Linux, and lets IT Drones play Quake all day.
I work at one that's damn close. My boss is technically savvy, lets me order what we need and lets me do what I want, provided I can prove we need it. We're a Windows site for the most part, but I've gotten two major apps running on Linux servers in the past year.
Yeah, it's academia. Yeah, the pay sucks. But I can also take vacation at the drop of a hat, I'm not on call, I can take the time to learn anything that's of interest to me (including going to any training course I can justify), and the first thing the boss asks me about in meetings is my son.
My sister's kids (2 and 4 years old) love Thomas too, but wow that stuff is expensive. I mean, $90 for one little piece like a crane or a building or something! It's insane. Small track kits can easily run $150 from what I saw.
With a few tricks it's not too bad, although like any well built wood toy it's not going to be cheap.
Buy a starter kit like the figure 8 set. A bunch of track + trains is about $40. Get a few switch/curve/straight sets and you can get enough track to cover a big floor for $75 or less.
Avoid accessories like the stations, water towers, etc. They are way expensive.
Go to Sam's club and buy the video+train car sets. VHS is ~$12, DVD ~14. The cars alone are often more than that in toy stores. The videos are pretty good too: far better than most of the kiddie video dreck.
Check offbeat places. Grandma buys Adam his stuff at a craft store that gives ~50% off list.
Normal Lego is a bit small at first. While I hate endorsing a copy, Megablocks are way cheap and a lot larger- Adam was able to put them together at barely a year, although even now he doesn't really "build" objects, just sticks things at random. You can buy 100 piece buckets for ~$14 where I am, and they are often on sale. My wife and I often have more fun with them than he does. (We really enjoy the Thomas train sets too, since we do all the track layouts. Toys are fun.)
Avoid Baby Lego: they don't stick together at all, which ends up frustrating the kid.
Oh come on: in any decent stat sample it's at least as good as the average, often more so. Median tends to remove far outliers. Mode is the useless one-for any sample size that isn't enormous and perfectly symmetrical it's basically random.
I'll trump your pathological example with my own: I, Bill Gates and 8 friends of mine are sitting in a room. Using the mean, the people in this room have a average net worth of about $5 billion. While LearJet might like to hear it, it isn't a valid description of the actual net worth of the people in that room.
Watch the Nova episode on the Rovers. Gustav Crater was the *risky* landing zone that the scientists really wanted but the engineers didn't know if they could do.
It's basically a huge basin that has what looks to be an old river leading into it. If there was water, this is where to look, at least in a place where we could actually land. (The constraints are large: needs to be near the equator to get direct transmission to earth, low elevation to get maximum aerobraking, not too bumpy, etc)
So MS should use its monopoly position to drive Symantec out of business by bundling it's main product, right?
Just checking to make sure this is ok with the rest of Slashdot.
Given a sampling of one...
on
Lonely Planets
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· Score: 1
it would appear that life is easy We have fossils back ~3.5 billion years, with people arguing about dates back another 300 million years. Much earlier isn't possible due to geology- the earth didn't have much liquid water before that. Either Earth got way lucky or simple life is less difficult than you think.
Now, complex life, that's hard, again given our single sample point. Earliest nucleated cell fossils are only ~2.1 billion years old, although some chemical data indicates it may have come around a few hundred million years earlier. Virtually no time for life, but at least a billion years to just get a cell nucleus.
Complex multicelluar? Way, way longer. Discounting stromatolites and a few sponges, you've got to wait to the early Cambrian before we see anything even remotely recognizable. (I'm not really familiar with Vendian life.) That's only about 550 million years ago, so anywhere from 1.5-2 billion years to start getting "real" critters.
As far as the balances needed to sustain life, remember that conditions on this planet were in large part shaped by life. For example, the atmosphere would be totally different without it. (Oxygen was toxic to early life) Life's also a lot more durable than you give it credit: look at deep sea thermal vents, various boiling hot springs and deep crust microbes.
That's almost what both my wife and I have asked for. Ditto my parents, sister and brother-in-law. (We do give each other a few magazine subscriptions) We got our son a few toys that he has asked for and a few small gifts for my niece and nephew, but for the most part my family isn't going to exchange much.
It's wonderful. No stress. No huge post-holiday bills. No fighting hordes of people.
Am I going to miss opening things? Frankly, no. I've got almost everything I want- I don't need an iPod. I don't need a Harmony remote. My 20-year-old stereo and 10-year-old TV work just fine, and my 15-year-old Nikon takes better pictures than virtually any digital camera on the market today. I refuse to buy RIAA sponsored CDs. My house is already cluttered with enough geegaws and bric-a-brac to fill half the attic and I don't want any more.[1]
Just say no to crap you don't really need. Eat a nice dinner with family and friends and watch a few football games on TV. Bliss.
[1] Well, if someone wants to buy me a nice A. kowalewskii specimen I won't turn it down, but my wife is the only one nuts enough to do it.
Space opera is not just Star Wars; that's a very weak version of it.
Space opera is also Banks, Simmons, Renyolds, Vinge or any of a half dozen other authors who can write complex, involved plots with great characters and subtle themes.
Harrington, Star Wars and similar stuff is more properly pulp SF
"Mainframe (n) An obsolete computer used by thousands of obsolete companies to serve millions of obsolete customers and make billions of obsolete dollars. This years are twice as fast as last years."
Why mod this funny?
on
Does IT Matter?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Funny? Insightful is much closer. I'm a crappy programmer and I could knock out something like the server side of iTunes in a day or two. But it wouldn't scale, it wouldn't be maintainable, the recovery plan would be shite, etc.
Doing the details right is hard, hard work. Witness both MS and Linux to see this: MS can't get the security thing down and Linux still fails at the ease of use thing, despite a lot of smart people working on both.
Exactly: I damn near cried at the end of Jurassic Bark. Being able to pull that off in a slapstick comedy is a sign of really good writing.
Another great example: watch the final episode of Blackadder sometime. You don't even notice the transition from a comedy mostly about farting and eating boiled rats to something truly sad until it's over.
The difference here is that iTunes doesn't suck. Lets be a little honest; Netscape dug its own grave. Netscape was never a great browser, and by the 4.x series was a slow, buggy, bloated pile of crap. I switched back around '97 when trying to code simple cross-platform Java apps and I could watch code straight out of Sun's docs fail on Netscape's JVM. IE was faster, smaller and simply worked better.
Now that Moz has caught up and passed IE, I've switched back. But iTunes is a pretty nice program now: if Steve doesn't screw it up badly in the next few years why would I switch?
For example, they're always available to help prevent the "establishment" of religion, but they're never around to preserve the "free-exercise" of it.
I invite your viewing of one of the ACLU's more recent cases, where they backed Jerry Falwell in a suit against the state of Virginia. Virginia had one set of laws for businesses, another for churches. Not kosher, and so the ACLU went to bat for him.
The ACLU is more than willing to help religious zealots, even when they usually spit on the values of the ACLU.
at least if it contains the results of the person's vote. Otherwise, you could have people going around demanding to see who you voted for with ugly consequences if you didn't pick the right guy. (Yes, this has happened in past elections.)
Simply put the receipt printer behind glass: the voter can see that the machine printed her vote correctly, but then it goes into a sealed box.
Computer technology is reaching that same level of integration within our economy. Your typical users doesn't know what a firewall is, yet at the same time they are unknowlingly exposing themselves to financial risk.
We assume enourmous physical risks every time we get in or near a car, yet huge numbers of people can't even change the oil on one. Cars are utterly essential to our economy, far more so than computers, yet I dare say half the folks proclaiming that everyone should be able to set up a firewall can't tell (and don't check) if their brake pads are dangerously worn. (And I include myself in that category: I can set up a firewall but I needed a mandated state inspection for the mechanic to tell me I needed new front pads and rotors.)
Consider recalls (aka, OS patches) How many cars aren't taken back for recalls, despite the fact that some car flaws can kill you? You expect folks to deal with arcane computer flaws that might crash their computer when they won't bother fixing something that could cause their airbag to fail?
It's simply not possible to know everything in the modern world. We have a huge service industry built up around maintaining cars complete with mechanic certification, mandated inpections, etc: we have a couple of college drop-out monkeys at BestBuy for (home) computers. I get people at work ask me all the time where a good computer mechanic is to fix their (crashed/crawling with bugs/loaded with adware) machines: I never know what to tell them.
MS has byyylliuons of dollars to fight these sorts of lawsuits. I can just see all the folks on/. cheering as MS spends sagans of dollars defending itself.
That is, until RedHat gets nailed with a worm or virus. It will happen: Linux is not bug free. (Folks with long memories will remember the RTM worm: infected only Unix machines and effectively shut the entire Internet down. We were a VMS shop, which was vastly more secure.)
RedHat has two choices.
Refuse to offer any guarantee. Congrats, you just lost the entire business sector: PHBs will simply refuse to buy software without the stamp of approval.
Get slammed with lawsuits. RedHat does not have sagans of dollars to defend itself, much less companies like Mandrake.
These sorts of lawsuits will have exactly the opposite of the desired effect: only behemoths like IBM and MS will be able to stay in the software business, not because their software is better but because only they have enough lawyers.
You're badly mistaken. Ilium is in every way an SF novel. It uses the Iliad as a base story, but that's about 1/3 of the book, and even that diverges from Homer's tale about halfway through the book.
Claiming the Iliad isn't SF is about the same as claiming that Hyperion wasn't because it was based on Keat's poetry.
Pick up a copy. Best book I've read in at least a year.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll hype my position: Instructional technologist
Yeah, the pay's not great, but here at least are a few of the perks, at least at my school.
It's not perfect by any means. Pay and benefits lag industry, there's some scut work, and I'd really like to get back to teaching students instead of faculty, but it's got some pretty nice bennies.
Whenever I read these sorts of narratives about Columbia, I'm always sitting there unconsiously thinking "Come on, a few more minutes. Hold together just a bit longer." Even when I know the exact times of breakup, it doesn't matter, I still think it.
Infantry have it even worse: we've at least got the beast to haul our stuff.
And that was peacetime. I was never shot at: feel for the folks on the front lines. They're doing a shitty job for almost no pay and they might come home in pieces.
There is no Politics-Free company out there that always spends money on the right stuff, never spends money on the wrong stuff, runs Linux, and lets IT Drones play Quake all day.
I work at one that's damn close. My boss is technically savvy, lets me order what we need and lets me do what I want, provided I can prove we need it. We're a Windows site for the most part, but I've gotten two major apps running on Linux servers in the past year.
Yeah, it's academia. Yeah, the pay sucks. But I can also take vacation at the drop of a hat, I'm not on call, I can take the time to learn anything that's of interest to me (including going to any training course I can justify), and the first thing the boss asks me about in meetings is my son.
Keep looking. Stuff like this is out there.
My sister's kids (2 and 4 years old) love Thomas too, but wow that stuff is expensive. I mean, $90 for one little piece like a crane or a building or something! It's insane. Small track kits can easily run $150 from what I saw.
With a few tricks it's not too bad, although like any well built wood toy it's not going to be cheap.
Avoid Baby Lego: they don't stick together at all, which ends up frustrating the kid.
I'll trump your pathological example with my own: I, Bill Gates and 8 friends of mine are sitting in a room. Using the mean, the people in this room have a average net worth of about $5 billion. While LearJet might like to hear it, it isn't a valid description of the actual net worth of the people in that room.
It's basically a huge basin that has what looks to be an old river leading into it. If there was water, this is where to look, at least in a place where we could actually land. (The constraints are large: needs to be near the equator to get direct transmission to earth, low elevation to get maximum aerobraking, not too bumpy, etc)
So MS should use its monopoly position to drive Symantec out of business by bundling it's main product, right? Just checking to make sure this is ok with the rest of Slashdot.
Now, complex life, that's hard, again given our single sample point. Earliest nucleated cell fossils are only ~2.1 billion years old, although some chemical data indicates it may have come around a few hundred million years earlier. Virtually no time for life, but at least a billion years to just get a cell nucleus.
Complex multicelluar? Way, way longer. Discounting stromatolites and a few sponges, you've got to wait to the early Cambrian before we see anything even remotely recognizable. (I'm not really familiar with Vendian life.) That's only about 550 million years ago, so anywhere from 1.5-2 billion years to start getting "real" critters.
As far as the balances needed to sustain life, remember that conditions on this planet were in large part shaped by life. For example, the atmosphere would be totally different without it. (Oxygen was toxic to early life) Life's also a lot more durable than you give it credit: look at deep sea thermal vents, various boiling hot springs and deep crust microbes.
It's going to come down like a ton of bricks when the news that OSX has only 25 users leaks out.
It's wonderful. No stress. No huge post-holiday bills. No fighting hordes of people.
Am I going to miss opening things? Frankly, no. I've got almost everything I want- I don't need an iPod. I don't need a Harmony remote. My 20-year-old stereo and 10-year-old TV work just fine, and my 15-year-old Nikon takes better pictures than virtually any digital camera on the market today. I refuse to buy RIAA sponsored CDs. My house is already cluttered with enough geegaws and bric-a-brac to fill half the attic and I don't want any more.[1]
Just say no to crap you don't really need. Eat a nice dinner with family and friends and watch a few football games on TV. Bliss.
[1] Well, if someone wants to buy me a nice A. kowalewskii specimen I won't turn it down, but my wife is the only one nuts enough to do it.
Space opera is also Banks, Simmons, Renyolds, Vinge or any of a half dozen other authors who can write complex, involved plots with great characters and subtle themes.
Harrington, Star Wars and similar stuff is more properly pulp SF
"Mainframe (n) An obsolete computer used by thousands of obsolete companies to serve millions of obsolete customers and make billions of obsolete dollars. This years are twice as fast as last years."
Doing the details right is hard, hard work. Witness both MS and Linux to see this: MS can't get the security thing down and Linux still fails at the ease of use thing, despite a lot of smart people working on both.
Another great example: watch the final episode of Blackadder sometime. You don't even notice the transition from a comedy mostly about farting and eating boiled rats to something truly sad until it's over.
Now that Moz has caught up and passed IE, I've switched back. But iTunes is a pretty nice program now: if Steve doesn't screw it up badly in the next few years why would I switch?
I want one, but my boss just doesn't seem happy about the idea. I wonder why?
For example, they're always available to help prevent the "establishment" of religion, but they're never around to preserve the "free-exercise" of it.
I invite your viewing of one of the ACLU's more recent cases, where they backed Jerry Falwell in a suit against the state of Virginia. Virginia had one set of laws for businesses, another for churches. Not kosher, and so the ACLU went to bat for him.
The ACLU is more than willing to help religious zealots, even when they usually spit on the values of the ACLU.
Simply put the receipt printer behind glass: the voter can see that the machine printed her vote correctly, but then it goes into a sealed box.
I think Ferris Fremont is on the line
They've been used as thrusters on satellites for years, and of course NASA's Deep Space 1 was powered by one back in the late 90s.
Computer technology is reaching that same level of integration within our economy. Your typical users doesn't know what a firewall is, yet at the same time they are unknowlingly exposing themselves to financial risk.
We assume enourmous physical risks every time we get in or near a car, yet huge numbers of people can't even change the oil on one. Cars are utterly essential to our economy, far more so than computers, yet I dare say half the folks proclaiming that everyone should be able to set up a firewall can't tell (and don't check) if their brake pads are dangerously worn. (And I include myself in that category: I can set up a firewall but I needed a mandated state inspection for the mechanic to tell me I needed new front pads and rotors.)
Consider recalls (aka, OS patches) How many cars aren't taken back for recalls, despite the fact that some car flaws can kill you? You expect folks to deal with arcane computer flaws that might crash their computer when they won't bother fixing something that could cause their airbag to fail?
It's simply not possible to know everything in the modern world. We have a huge service industry built up around maintaining cars complete with mechanic certification, mandated inpections, etc: we have a couple of college drop-out monkeys at BestBuy for (home) computers. I get people at work ask me all the time where a good computer mechanic is to fix their (crashed/crawling with bugs/loaded with adware) machines: I never know what to tell them.
That is, until RedHat gets nailed with a worm or virus. It will happen: Linux is not bug free. (Folks with long memories will remember the RTM worm: infected only Unix machines and effectively shut the entire Internet down. We were a VMS shop, which was vastly more secure.)
RedHat has two choices.
These sorts of lawsuits will have exactly the opposite of the desired effect: only behemoths like IBM and MS will be able to stay in the software business, not because their software is better but because only they have enough lawyers.
Claiming the Iliad isn't SF is about the same as claiming that Hyperion wasn't because it was based on Keat's poetry.
Pick up a copy. Best book I've read in at least a year.