I just downloaded 3 years of my savings account information on ingdirect to test. They offered it in CSV and two other formats (like Quicken probably, I forget specifically and already closed that tab out).
If you want experience, then you want something like a summer internship. Lots of companies hire college students for 10-12 weeks over the summer. You'll get a little bit of experience, and you'll get better pay than working at Starbucks.
Or you can work part-time during the school year. I did a part-time job 20 hours a week at a local research institute affiliated with the college I went to as an undergrad. It was nice enough pay to get some spending money on top of paying for the basics, and I got a lot of useful experience.
There's also open source experience, but I know nothing about that personally.
If you wanted to focus on a language, I suppose you could look into various certifications, like Sun Java certifications. Those cost money. The type of hiring we do, we don't care about those (we're a research institute, we want to see advanced degrees) but some others might have an idea if they're actually worth anything in the programming field. I'm skeptical, but maybe it's useful for a new grad.
A Masters is not going to help you get a coding job. A Master is going to help you get a research job.
There are companies out there that do research in the field of computer science -- large companies that might have a dedicated research lab or two, or small and mid-size companies that can be fully dedicated to research.
So figure out what you're interested in:
1. Strictly coding? Go out there and grab job experience. Maybe look into some sort of applicable certification, by Sun or Microsoft or someone. Get OpenSource experience. Code recreationally.
2. Research? Look into a Masters or PhD. Wondering how to find companies that do research? Google around for institutions like NSA and DARPA that grant research contracts, and see what companies are winning them.
3. Academics? You'll want a PhD -- unless you're interested in teaching below the college level, in which case you'll need to get teaching certified.
4. Management? A Masters could help, but so could a MBA (try one with a specialty in IT). Or work you way up the food chain (you'll have to do that anyway) and look into some sort of program management certification. Google around for something like 'PMP certification' and you'll read about them.
The good thing is you don't have to decide now. The better thing is, you can change you mind. I thought I wanted to do academics, did a year of PhD program at Georgia Tech, decided it wasn't for me, then decided I wanted to do research, joined a small research organization, then 15 years later decided to go back and work on my Masters. Even better? Where I work is paying me to pick up my Masters part time. I might also work on picking up my PMP certification, since I seem to have most of the requirements anyway.
I haven't played WoW in well over a year, an only then for 5 or 6 months before my attention span dropped. But I seem to remember that at least back in the day, there were designated 'RP servers' and 'PVE servers' and 'PVP servers'.
I wonder what would happen if there were designated 'bot-allowed' servers. Would those who used bots still enjoy their bot-enhanced abilities if everyone was allowed to use them? Or would it let them level up or grind items or whatever just the same as they did illegally, so all would be happy?
Then again, since I haven't played in forever, maybe it's easier to move characters/items/gold between servers now (legally or otherwise) so this might mess up even non-bot servers, if bots were 'legalized' and there were suddenly ten times as many.
I personally thing it would be fun to see them all following the same farming scripts in the same areas, though. Mass chaos! Though as a programmer geek, working on bot AI modules is kind of appealing.
I still don't understand the "oh no, you should just parent responsibly!" argument. It makes no sense at all to me. It's a tool. Parents still make the rules.
How many people use oven timers? Oh sure, you could just look at the clock and decide when to check on whatever's baking in the oven. Or you could just guess. But it sure is awfully convenient to have a timer to measure!
I was involved with the recruiting process for a small R&D firm for a number of years.
For new grads, we did look at GPA. If it was under 3.0, the applicant needed to stand out. If the GPA within major was under 3.0 (and we asked for both) the applicant REALLY needed to stand out. Basically, if you screwed around and flunked geology we weren't as concerned as if you were struggling to keep a 2.5 up in Comp Sci. That said, if the person had a good explanation for why the GPA was low AND they proved they were competent, we'd overlook it.
Once someone had been in the workplace for a couple of years, we never asked about GPA and instead asked about job experience. Sometimes people we would still include GPA, but if they didn't, we didn't really care.
I RTFA, but it was one of the comments that amused me:
"A similar thing was/is in use at a place I worked. People made an effort to stay in the toilet for a long time (doodling on their PDA) and later claimed they were reading the work notes...:)"
Ahem. 'Doodling on their PDA'? So is that what you kids call it these days?
I don't think the concern is over whether you send a quick email to Aunt Bea asking if she's coming to the family reunion this weekend, but whether you email your direct competitor the nitty gritty details about an upcoming marketing strategy, proprietary code from the latest release, etc., etc.
THEhotel I stayed at had a 42" plasma TV in the living room, and smaller ones in the bedroom and bathroom, on their 'standard' rooms. Don't think they were HDTV, though.
I glanced at the front page just to check the connection speed at Djuma, which is in Sabi Sands, which is in South Africa. I stopped by to use the PC in the evening to dash off a quick email home and would tend to bring up CNN, Yahoo Mail, and Slashdot in that order.
Monkeys would hang out just a few feet away, outside the hut, watching me. Kind of wild.
(And here's a link for the game lodge, which was a gorgeous place.)
I'll agree that there are idiot managers out there. There are idiot managers in companies that are otherwise succeeding, and they somehow skate around the fact that they're, well, idiots in some regards, and either don't do enough damage to get noticed or make up for it in other ways, despite their idiocy.
But, you know, speaking of inferiority complexes, trumpetting how insecure most people above you are and how smart you and your peers makes you look...? Say it with me now: insecure.
It just really gets me sometimes how some people go off about how most people above them are idiots. I mean, damn, it's amazing we managed to crawl out of caves at this rate, by that logic!
I definitely recommend checking with a tax lawyer (or at least post on slashdot, hey, we're all lawyers here!) for tax advice, so you don't get screwed over. Do not assume that this works the same as it does for enlisted soldiers! Because it doesn't.
I have a friend working as a civilian contractor in Afghanistan, and he looked into it and was told the same story: 330 days out of a 365 day period, but from what he said, it's not necessarily a calendar year (i.e., if you leave in March, you're not screwed for two years).
I also have a friend on a navy ship, enlisted, and it's different. For them, one day in either a war zone or 'imminent danger zone' (I think that's the phrase he used) means their pay for the month is tax-free. It's a big deal to him because their navy ship was supposed to cross the imaginary line into tax-free land a few days before the end of this month. A typhoon is possibly delaying that. He's real anxious to cross because he wants the extra pay for the month!
I travel a lot for business, and had an ISP that was bought by another ISP that was bought out by another ISP, etc. So when I'd arrive at a new city it was hit or miss whether or not the numbers would work, as apparently there was all this voodoo magic involved in making my account work on all the different infrastructure.
So. I called tech support with a dial-in problem, as I often did when in a new city. First off the guy insisted that I [b]had[/b] to use their proprietary software or I couldn't dial in. I convinced him I could use Windows DUN instead. He asked me what the name of my icon was used to dialup. I told him, it was something like "Mindspring Wichita" since I had about 40 of them labelled by city.
He insisted, from this point on, that I couldn't have multiple icons like that, because they [b]had[/b] to be named one particular string or it wouldn't work! God, that was frustrating. I just wanted my damn email. I tried to get passed up the tech support chain but he wouldn't. I ended up getting his name, calling back, getting someone else, reporting him, and getting the problem fixed once they did the voodoo magic to set me up on the new POP.
Ditto here on the problems holding the thing upside down. At least a few times a week I make a blind grab for the thing, to forward through commercials, and end up hitting the 'back' button instead of 'forward'. Highly annoying.
Ball room (not that kind)
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 1
Neatest thing I saw wasn't a cube but an office someone had filled with a foot or two of plastic balls. You know those ball pits you see at fast food restaurants for kids? Like that. It was pretty impressive being a good-sized office. Balls were everywhere, in drifts on the ground at least a foot deep at the shallowest point, on shelves, on filing cabinets, on the desk, in the drawers, everywhere.
There was a story behind them. They represented something or another that they were messaging, and wanted to visualize how big it was, and so for every so many they threw a ball in the office and-- uh, I forget the story, but it was an office full of brightly colored plastic balls. Great ammo, too. Anyone who visited him had to wade through balls and brush them off of the chairs to even sit...
Post Properties are big when I live in Atlanta. I admit, when I was moving the lure of their PostSmart apartments was fairly high.
Basically, their new apartments are built wired to support home networking (wired), surround sound, and multiple phone lines. The outlets, however, were fairly ugly -- huge wall units like you'd see in a business. But there were network drops in every room and plenty of outlets and, most appealing to me, audio wires for surround sound and multiple speakers. I hate wiring for surround sound in the living room every time I change apartments. Here, you just plugged into the wall behind the TV, and then the wires came out the other side of the room and even on the patio.
Ultimately, despite the high geek factor, I didn't go with the properties with this feature. The rent was pretty steep compared to what I could get elsewhere, and wireless was already on the scene so I figured the networking wouldn't be too crucial. I'm also wondering if they opened the electrical system to support such a wired household. Hrm. I haven't heard of any burning down lately, I suppose...
Tell me about it. I went traipsing about the globe recently, and AIM was on maybe one computer that I saw (and someone probably installed it there themselves). Yahoo was much, much more prevalent. This was in New Zealand & Australia, South Africa, and some bits of Europe.
As an unrelated aside, most annoying were internet cafes that didn't have any of them installed, and only had computers that let you web browse. You couldn't even open a regular telnet prompt on them. I'd heard rumors of a web-based Yahoo client or something, but figured even if it existed it'd require machine permissions those "web browser only" machines wouldn't have.
Back in college we had a game of this. Obviously we were too dirt poor to buy anything, and being geeky losers, we had little social life for such things to interfere with.
I forget the exact rules. It was point-based, though, and you got certain points based on how many minutes you held the telemarketer on the land. Then you got bonus points for inducing them into profanity, getting them to say certain phrases, getting successfully transferred to someone else, getting hung up on, etc.
I read the banner ad paper. I don't get it, though..They were testing a person's abilility to search for specific information. You know, odds are it's not going to be in a banner ad, it'll be in the content of the page. I thought the whole point of banner advertising (and advertising in general) was not to help people find things they already wanted, but to entice them into buying things they might otherwise not buy.
Yeah, yeah, open source software, that's all well and go.
But I know that my share of the tax money is going to pay for fighter jets, not software. I'd like to take one out for a spin next weekend. They are, after all, purchased with my tax dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
I just downloaded 3 years of my savings account information on ingdirect to test. They offered it in CSV and two other formats (like Quicken probably, I forget specifically and already closed that tab out).
Knowing how to code is easy. Being a decent software engineer isn't. 90+% of web developers fall into the first category.
And 90 % of developers think they are a part of that 10%. And they disagree on who else is in that category.
This is because of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect), which has been studied.
The more you know.
If you want experience, then you want something like a summer internship. Lots of companies hire college students for 10-12 weeks over the summer. You'll get a little bit of experience, and you'll get better pay than working at Starbucks.
Or you can work part-time during the school year. I did a part-time job 20 hours a week at a local research institute affiliated with the college I went to as an undergrad. It was nice enough pay to get some spending money on top of paying for the basics, and I got a lot of useful experience.
There's also open source experience, but I know nothing about that personally.
If you wanted to focus on a language, I suppose you could look into various certifications, like Sun Java certifications. Those cost money. The type of hiring we do, we don't care about those (we're a research institute, we want to see advanced degrees) but some others might have an idea if they're actually worth anything in the programming field. I'm skeptical, but maybe it's useful for a new grad.
A Masters is not going to help you get a coding job. A Master is going to help you get a research job.
There are companies out there that do research in the field of computer science -- large companies that might have a dedicated research lab or two, or small and mid-size companies that can be fully dedicated to research.
So figure out what you're interested in:
1. Strictly coding? Go out there and grab job experience. Maybe look into some sort of applicable certification, by Sun or Microsoft or someone. Get OpenSource experience. Code recreationally.
2. Research? Look into a Masters or PhD. Wondering how to find companies that do research? Google around for institutions like NSA and DARPA that grant research contracts, and see what companies are winning them.
3. Academics? You'll want a PhD -- unless you're interested in teaching below the college level, in which case you'll need to get teaching certified.
4. Management? A Masters could help, but so could a MBA (try one with a specialty in IT). Or work you way up the food chain (you'll have to do that anyway) and look into some sort of program management certification. Google around for something like 'PMP certification' and you'll read about them.
The good thing is you don't have to decide now. The better thing is, you can change you mind. I thought I wanted to do academics, did a year of PhD program at Georgia Tech, decided it wasn't for me, then decided I wanted to do research, joined a small research organization, then 15 years later decided to go back and work on my Masters. Even better? Where I work is paying me to pick up my Masters part time. I might also work on picking up my PMP certification, since I seem to have most of the requirements anyway.
Just remember, you can change your mind later.
I haven't played WoW in well over a year, an only then for 5 or 6 months before my attention span dropped. But I seem to remember that at least back in the day, there were designated 'RP servers' and 'PVE servers' and 'PVP servers'.
I wonder what would happen if there were designated 'bot-allowed' servers. Would those who used bots still enjoy their bot-enhanced abilities if everyone was allowed to use them? Or would it let them level up or grind items or whatever just the same as they did illegally, so all would be happy?
Then again, since I haven't played in forever, maybe it's easier to move characters/items/gold between servers now (legally or otherwise) so this might mess up even non-bot servers, if bots were 'legalized' and there were suddenly ten times as many.
I personally thing it would be fun to see them all following the same farming scripts in the same areas, though. Mass chaos! Though as a programmer geek, working on bot AI modules is kind of appealing.
I still don't understand the "oh no, you should just parent responsibly!" argument. It makes no sense at all to me. It's a tool. Parents still make the rules.
How many people use oven timers? Oh sure, you could just look at the clock and decide when to check on whatever's baking in the oven. Or you could just guess. But it sure is awfully convenient to have a timer to measure!
I was involved with the recruiting process for a small R&D firm for a number of years.
For new grads, we did look at GPA. If it was under 3.0, the applicant needed to stand out. If the GPA within major was under 3.0 (and we asked for both) the applicant REALLY needed to stand out. Basically, if you screwed around and flunked geology we weren't as concerned as if you were struggling to keep a 2.5 up in Comp Sci. That said, if the person had a good explanation for why the GPA was low AND they proved they were competent, we'd overlook it.
Once someone had been in the workplace for a couple of years, we never asked about GPA and instead asked about job experience. Sometimes people we would still include GPA, but if they didn't, we didn't really care.
I RTFA, but it was one of the comments that amused me:
Ahem. 'Doodling on their PDA'? So is that what you kids call it these days?
Tangentially this reminds me of my helpful 'offensive mail alert feature' in Eudora.
When my coworker was off email for the day, at a conference, the alert flagged the message as offense.
Perhaps he should have set the Subject as "Jack off email"...
I don't think the concern is over whether you send a quick email to Aunt Bea asking if she's coming to the family reunion this weekend, but whether you email your direct competitor the nitty gritty details about an upcoming marketing strategy, proprietary code from the latest release, etc., etc.
I thought Jack Chick already published A Parent's Guide to Role Playing Games?
THEhotel I stayed at had a 42" plasma TV in the living room, and smaller ones in the bedroom and bathroom, on their 'standard' rooms. Don't think they were HDTV, though.
Since the vast majority of people use qwerty keyboards, I think picture passwords would work better for the Dvorak users out there.
I glanced at the front page just to check the connection speed at Djuma, which is in Sabi Sands, which is in South Africa. I stopped by to use the PC in the evening to dash off a quick email home and would tend to bring up CNN, Yahoo Mail, and Slashdot in that order.
Monkeys would hang out just a few feet away, outside the hut, watching me. Kind of wild.
(And here's a link for the game lodge, which was a gorgeous place.)
I'll agree that there are idiot managers out there. There are idiot managers in companies that are otherwise succeeding, and they somehow skate around the fact that they're, well, idiots in some regards, and either don't do enough damage to get noticed or make up for it in other ways, despite their idiocy.
But, you know, speaking of inferiority complexes, trumpetting how insecure most people above you are and how smart you and your peers makes you look...? Say it with me now: insecure.
It just really gets me sometimes how some people go off about how most people above them are idiots. I mean, damn, it's amazing we managed to crawl out of caves at this rate, by that logic!
I definitely recommend checking with a tax lawyer (or at least post on slashdot, hey, we're all lawyers here!) for tax advice, so you don't get screwed over. Do not assume that this works the same as it does for enlisted soldiers! Because it doesn't.
I have a friend working as a civilian contractor in Afghanistan, and he looked into it and was told the same story: 330 days out of a 365 day period, but from what he said, it's not necessarily a calendar year (i.e., if you leave in March, you're not screwed for two years).
I also have a friend on a navy ship, enlisted, and it's different. For them, one day in either a war zone or 'imminent danger zone' (I think that's the phrase he used) means their pay for the month is tax-free. It's a big deal to him because their navy ship was supposed to cross the imaginary line into tax-free land a few days before the end of this month. A typhoon is possibly delaying that. He's real anxious to cross because he wants the extra pay for the month!
I'm running Firefox with Flash ads blocked by default, but the mouseover popup still got through.
I travel a lot for business, and had an ISP that was bought by another ISP that was bought out by another ISP, etc. So when I'd arrive at a new city it was hit or miss whether or not the numbers would work, as apparently there was all this voodoo magic involved in making my account work on all the different infrastructure.
So. I called tech support with a dial-in problem, as I often did when in a new city. First off the guy insisted that I [b]had[/b] to use their proprietary software or I couldn't dial in. I convinced him I could use Windows DUN instead. He asked me what the name of my icon was used to dialup. I told him, it was something like "Mindspring Wichita" since I had about 40 of them labelled by city.
He insisted, from this point on, that I couldn't have multiple icons like that, because they [b]had[/b] to be named one particular string or it wouldn't work! God, that was frustrating. I just wanted my damn email. I tried to get passed up the tech support chain but he wouldn't. I ended up getting his name, calling back, getting someone else, reporting him, and getting the problem fixed once they did the voodoo magic to set me up on the new POP.
Fricking idiot.
Ditto here on the problems holding the thing upside down. At least a few times a week I make a blind grab for the thing, to forward through commercials, and end up hitting the 'back' button instead of 'forward'. Highly annoying.
Neatest thing I saw wasn't a cube but an office someone had filled with a foot or two of plastic balls. You know those ball pits you see at fast food restaurants for kids? Like that. It was pretty impressive being a good-sized office. Balls were everywhere, in drifts on the ground at least a foot deep at the shallowest point, on shelves, on filing cabinets, on the desk, in the drawers, everywhere.
There was a story behind them. They represented something or another that they were messaging, and wanted to visualize how big it was, and so for every so many they threw a ball in the office and-- uh, I forget the story, but it was an office full of brightly colored plastic balls. Great ammo, too. Anyone who visited him had to wade through balls and brush them off of the chairs to even sit...
Post Properties are big when I live in Atlanta. I admit, when I was moving the lure of their PostSmart apartments was fairly high.
Basically, their new apartments are built wired to support home networking (wired), surround sound, and multiple phone lines. The outlets, however, were fairly ugly -- huge wall units like you'd see in a business. But there were network drops in every room and plenty of outlets and, most appealing to me, audio wires for surround sound and multiple speakers. I hate wiring for surround sound in the living room every time I change apartments. Here, you just plugged into the wall behind the TV, and then the wires came out the other side of the room and even on the patio.
Ultimately, despite the high geek factor, I didn't go with the properties with this feature. The rent was pretty steep compared to what I could get elsewhere, and wireless was already on the scene so I figured the networking wouldn't be too crucial. I'm also wondering if they opened the electrical system to support such a wired household. Hrm. I haven't heard of any burning down lately, I suppose...
Tell me about it. I went traipsing about the globe recently, and AIM was on maybe one computer that I saw (and someone probably installed it there themselves). Yahoo was much, much more prevalent. This was in New Zealand & Australia, South Africa, and some bits of Europe.
As an unrelated aside, most annoying were internet cafes that didn't have any of them installed, and only had computers that let you web browse. You couldn't even open a regular telnet prompt on them. I'd heard rumors of a web-based Yahoo client or something, but figured even if it existed it'd require machine permissions those "web browser only" machines wouldn't have.
Back in college we had a game of this. Obviously we were too dirt poor to buy anything, and being geeky losers, we had little social life for such things to interfere with.
I forget the exact rules. It was point-based, though, and you got certain points based on how many minutes you held the telemarketer on the land. Then you got bonus points for inducing them into profanity, getting them to say certain phrases, getting successfully transferred to someone else, getting hung up on, etc.
Okay. So it was fun at the moment...
I read the banner ad paper. I don't get it, though. .They were testing a person's abilility to search for specific information. You know, odds are it's not going to be in a banner ad, it'll be in the content of the page. I thought the whole point of banner advertising (and advertising in general) was not to help people find things they already wanted, but to entice them into buying things they might otherwise not buy.
Yeah, yeah, open source software, that's all well and go.
But I know that my share of the tax money is going to pay for fighter jets, not software. I'd like to take one out for a spin next weekend. They are, after all, purchased with my tax dollars.
So where do I sign up?