I'm surprised nobody mentioned J.D. Stone, who holds the title "Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy" at my alma mater.
Regrettably, I took none of J.D.'s classes and only participated in his Exotic Programming Languages Study Group in the mid-80s. But I have it on good authority that I missed out.
Dude, AML sucks. Good deal you got into remission.
As another followup says, cancer is strange--you can get it for no apparent reason at all. My kid dealt with AML when she was five years old and did the whole marrow-transplant thing... and I know she wasn't sweeping radioactive dust off a ship beforehand.
...I seriously doubt that there is much in the way of code that will last more than 10-15 years.
...he says as I take a break from maintaining an application that goes back to at least 1987 (hard to tell from the comments) and is still being used in, oh, a few thousand sites.
Sooooo... it was mid-1999 and I was starting on a contract with a new client in Philadelphia. They flew me in from Cleveland on Sunday night, and my hotel was right on the river. A quick check of public transit maps showed that I could catch the R1 line to Center City and then ride the Blue Line over to Second Street, with only a short walk to the river from there.
Yeah. Right. At eleven o'clock at night. Loaded down with a laptop and travel suitcase. Under bridges and stuff, down unlit streets, not sure exactly where I was going.
It wasn't the brightest thing I'd ever done, but I managed to get to the hotel unscathed, and it impressed the hell out of my colleagues. They knew not to mess with me.:-)
about 2/3 of US companies paid no corporate income tax last year...
Depending on the details, this might not be such a bad thing. If this is counting every single corporate entity, no matter how small, it probably includes a few million self-employed people who have created their own C-corps for liability purposes.
In these situations it is common to give yourself a year-end bonus to reduce the corporation's profit (and hence its tax liability) to zero. That shifts the tax burden to the owner's personal return, where the rates are a little more advantageous, but taxes are indeed paid on that income.
I could easily believe that two thirds of US corporations are similarly situated in some way. You could also take into account those subsidiaries of larger companies, who pay out all their profits as "management fees" and such to the parent organization. Again, the parent corporation pays all taxes while the subsidiaries report zero profits. Taxes are shifted, not evaded.
It's a place where no worker will listen to any social engineering attempt, you know.
Don't be so sure. I have a little running joke I play at food establishments. I tell them that I'm the restaurant reviewer for the Akron Beacon-Journal or the Plain Dealer or the Toledo Blade or something, and go on to explain that most establishments give me pretty much one of everything and bill the paper, yadda yadda...
Everywhere I go that gets a little chuckle and no free food. Except at this one McDonald's...
But I didn't feel right about this joke going too far. I do think I had a decent chance of social-engineering my way into a fast-food-induced heart attack though.
And if he was seen walking out of the store with a pallet full of computers by a video camera (assuming they kept tapes for that long), they would have seen him approached by an assistant manager who let him walk out of the store with the merchandice! And again, that is where the social engineering would have continued to work, anyone reviewing said tape would have seen him being checked out by the assistant manager, assumed the assistant manager was doing his job, and that there was a legitimate reason for him to take those computers out (even though the reviewer never heard the conversation).
It gets better than that! The assistant manager has a great incentive to cover up. He's most likely to say, "Oh yeah, I checked the paperwork, it was fine." What else is he going to do? If he admits he carelessly let the perp through, it's his head too.
who felt that "lecture" meant "read the chapter aloud in a monotone"....
I know what you mean! I assiduously avoid that--I started the semester telling the students, "You all know how to read!" So I will fill in the bits that aren't in the textbooks, give vivid examples, and watch for the parts the students don't understand.
Frequently when a student doesn't grasp a concept I will find another way to explain it--often by switching from visual to aural techniques or vice versa. I find metaphors to be incredibly useful for some, such as comparing the parsing of a VB statement to diagramming an English sentence. And other students might be mystified by the same metaphor but that's okay, I'll think of a way to get through to everyone if it is at all possible.
It's a lot of time and energy for what they pay. But it is a great intellectual exercise for me! I get to work out brain muscles that don't get used very often.
Wow... all these posts and nobody mentions the many fine public community colleges!
Quality of courses and instructors varies widely--and with open admissions, I suppose many students may lack aptitude. But you have reasonable tuition rates, stability, and accountability. Not to mention accreditation.
I just started teaching Visual Basic programming (yeah, I know, I know...) at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. I feel a place like CCC is a pretty good alternative to for-profit private tech schools, although as a liberal-arts snob myself I am glad I attended a very competitive four-year private college.
As with anything else, there are good and bad community colleges. But I'm surprised nobody mentioned them as an option.
Agreed. I like having my little B.A. in math from a liberal-arts school where I also took African-American history, music, economics, and Latin. I can usually find about five different ways to solve any "I.T." problem.:-)
Turns out they also have a hell of a basketball team, who knew?
I know computer science majors who have never opened up a machine.
Opening up a machine is not part of Computer Science. You might as well criticize Political Science majors for not holding public office.
The idea that tech == money has contributed to many people going into tech that haven't any interest in it
Amen.
Re:Interview questions.
on
Beyond Pay?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Asking if a person is married is most likely legal in fact I know that it is required for many retirement plans.
But that comes after you are hired. You can't ask (in the US) a job candidate if they are married (because it might indicate an intent to discriminate on gender), nor their age, religion, racial/ethnic background, stuff like that. A lot of times it's pretty obvious--such as when the candidate is wearing a wedding band--and of course the candidate frequently brings these issues up, such as one fellow I interviewed who talked about the technical work he did on his church's missionary project.
If (for example) you're interviewing a woman, asking whether she is married could be construed as a sideways attempt to find out whether she plans to have children and thus might want to take maternity leave in the future... which, despite the equal protection of the Family Leave Act, still comes off as a question that is discriminatory against women. So it's a bad thing to ask even if the law doesn't specifically prohibit it.
Once the hiring decision is made and communicated to the candidate, sure, you can ask all sorts of personal questions for non-hiring decisions. Because then you are largely out of the realm of discrimination law unless work conditions change.
The guy in india is a human being too, and probably has had to bust his ass harder than you to get a lot less than the cushy life you've already had if you are a typical American...
True, but on the other hand he probably paid a hell of a lot less for his education too. We talk about "retraining" in the US but it largely amounts to asking people who are (at least temporarily) broke to put tens of thousands of dollars into more education that may or may not pay off in a better job. Most other countries subsidize higher education more fully.
...except that we were busy establishing the industry. It wasn't a revolutionary leap, but neither "master/slave" nor anything else had really taken a foothold. The specific usage of "lead register" (as opposed to master) indicated the one that was first to open in the morning, last to close in the evening, ran most of the reports, etc. That wasn't necessarily the same as the server, even in a peer-to-peer network where some other register might have acted as a server, and it didn't preclude the possibility of a host-based multi-register system with no server at all.
When there's no existing nomenclature, at least none standardized, I think you get to pick your own.
Around 1991 I joined a point-of-sale software company just as we were starting to develop and sell LAN-compatible setups. Our "master/slave" nomenclature set off bad vibes for me, and "server/client" wasn't technically accurate in our context.
Thus my internal documentation talked about "lead" and "non-lead" registers, as do a few user-visible references. I didn't force anyone, but the terms caught on somehow and to my knowledge the successor company still says "lead" and "non-lead."
Is it "political correctness" if you start using an expression and it catches on?
What's more, you miss what most GNU advocates miss, which is the irony of their position: the GPL strongly depends on intellectual property protection!
It's an intended bit of irony though. It leverages IP law to keep things as "free" as possible within that regime. In the absence of IP, everything would be in the public domain (although trade secret might still apply to some software?) and the viral nature of the GPL would become irrelevant.
Hmmmmmm.... in fact, the GPL doesn't depend on IP at all, not in any way that matters. Without IP law, the GPL itself would become irrelevant, to wit:
You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or
distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are
prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
That "nothing else" clause pretty much goes away if copyright goes away. And the goals of the GPL (at least as far as RMS is concerned) are thus achieved.
Actually, in Iowa they make you sign a statement that you actually support the party before you join the caucus meeting. They did in 1984 and 1988 anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I had 441 trick-or-treaters. Not a typo.
No it doesn't. Mudslinging is a pretty well-defined term. You have to wonder about the motivations of people who want to blur that meaning.
Checking with the college's Institutional Review Board would be a really good idea at this point.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned J.D. Stone, who holds the title "Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy" at my alma mater. Regrettably, I took none of J.D.'s classes and only participated in his Exotic Programming Languages Study Group in the mid-80s. But I have it on good authority that I missed out.
Hey, Case guy!
(I imagine it's one of the more liberal-artsy engineering schools, and rigorous as hell.)
No. See an opthalmologist. That's the doc who can actually diagnose and treat the condition if you have it.
Dude, AML sucks. Good deal you got into remission.
As another followup says, cancer is strange--you can get it for no apparent reason at all. My kid dealt with AML when she was five years old and did the whole marrow-transplant thing... and I know she wasn't sweeping radioactive dust off a ship beforehand.
Dude, some software lasts a long, long time.
Sooooo... it was mid-1999 and I was starting on a contract with a new client in Philadelphia. They flew me in from Cleveland on Sunday night, and my hotel was right on the river. A quick check of public transit maps showed that I could catch the R1 line to Center City and then ride the Blue Line over to Second Street, with only a short walk to the river from there.
Yeah. Right. At eleven o'clock at night. Loaded down with a laptop and travel suitcase. Under bridges and stuff, down unlit streets, not sure exactly where I was going.
It wasn't the brightest thing I'd ever done, but I managed to get to the hotel unscathed, and it impressed the hell out of my colleagues. They knew not to mess with me. :-)
Was?
I'm just saying...
Depending on the details, this might not be such a bad thing. If this is counting every single corporate entity, no matter how small, it probably includes a few million self-employed people who have created their own C-corps for liability purposes.
In these situations it is common to give yourself a year-end bonus to reduce the corporation's profit (and hence its tax liability) to zero. That shifts the tax burden to the owner's personal return, where the rates are a little more advantageous, but taxes are indeed paid on that income.
I could easily believe that two thirds of US corporations are similarly situated in some way. You could also take into account those subsidiaries of larger companies, who pay out all their profits as "management fees" and such to the parent organization. Again, the parent corporation pays all taxes while the subsidiaries report zero profits. Taxes are shifted, not evaded.
And at that point, how could anyone possibly blame the guard?
When they go to such lengths to make the heist look legit, what's the poor guy gonna do? I hope he kept his job.
Don't be so sure. I have a little running joke I play at food establishments. I tell them that I'm the restaurant reviewer for the Akron Beacon-Journal or the Plain Dealer or the Toledo Blade or something, and go on to explain that most establishments give me pretty much one of everything and bill the paper, yadda yadda...
Everywhere I go that gets a little chuckle and no free food. Except at this one McDonald's...
But I didn't feel right about this joke going too far. I do think I had a decent chance of social-engineering my way into a fast-food-induced heart attack though.
It gets better than that! The assistant manager has a great incentive to cover up. He's most likely to say, "Oh yeah, I checked the paperwork, it was fine." What else is he going to do? If he admits he carelessly let the perp through, it's his head too.
Talk about getting people on your side!
I know what you mean! I assiduously avoid that--I started the semester telling the students, "You all know how to read!" So I will fill in the bits that aren't in the textbooks, give vivid examples, and watch for the parts the students don't understand. Frequently when a student doesn't grasp a concept I will find another way to explain it--often by switching from visual to aural techniques or vice versa. I find metaphors to be incredibly useful for some, such as comparing the parsing of a VB statement to diagramming an English sentence. And other students might be mystified by the same metaphor but that's okay, I'll think of a way to get through to everyone if it is at all possible. It's a lot of time and energy for what they pay. But it is a great intellectual exercise for me! I get to work out brain muscles that don't get used very often.
I'm a liberal arts snob. I don't expect everyone else to be one!
Wow... all these posts and nobody mentions the many fine public community colleges!
Quality of courses and instructors varies widely--and with open admissions, I suppose many students may lack aptitude. But you have reasonable tuition rates, stability, and accountability. Not to mention accreditation.
I just started teaching Visual Basic programming (yeah, I know, I know...) at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. I feel a place like CCC is a pretty good alternative to for-profit private tech schools, although as a liberal-arts snob myself I am glad I attended a very competitive four-year private college.
As with anything else, there are good and bad community colleges. But I'm surprised nobody mentioned them as an option.
Agreed. I like having my little B.A. in math from a liberal-arts school where I also took African-American history, music, economics, and Latin. I can usually find about five different ways to solve any "I.T." problem. :-)
Turns out they also have a hell of a basketball team, who knew?
Opening up a machine is not part of Computer Science. You might as well criticize Political Science majors for not holding public office.
Amen.
But that comes after you are hired. You can't ask (in the US) a job candidate if they are married (because it might indicate an intent to discriminate on gender), nor their age, religion, racial/ethnic background, stuff like that. A lot of times it's pretty obvious--such as when the candidate is wearing a wedding band--and of course the candidate frequently brings these issues up, such as one fellow I interviewed who talked about the technical work he did on his church's missionary project.
If (for example) you're interviewing a woman, asking whether she is married could be construed as a sideways attempt to find out whether she plans to have children and thus might want to take maternity leave in the future... which, despite the equal protection of the Family Leave Act, still comes off as a question that is discriminatory against women. So it's a bad thing to ask even if the law doesn't specifically prohibit it.
Once the hiring decision is made and communicated to the candidate, sure, you can ask all sorts of personal questions for non-hiring decisions. Because then you are largely out of the realm of discrimination law unless work conditions change.
True, but on the other hand he probably paid a hell of a lot less for his education too. We talk about "retraining" in the US but it largely amounts to asking people who are (at least temporarily) broke to put tens of thousands of dollars into more education that may or may not pay off in a better job. Most other countries subsidize higher education more fully.
When there's no existing nomenclature, at least none standardized, I think you get to pick your own.
Around 1991 I joined a point-of-sale software company just as we were starting to develop and sell LAN-compatible setups. Our "master/slave" nomenclature set off bad vibes for me, and "server/client" wasn't technically accurate in our context.
Thus my internal documentation talked about "lead" and "non-lead" registers, as do a few user-visible references. I didn't force anyone, but the terms caught on somehow and to my knowledge the successor company still says "lead" and "non-lead."
Is it "political correctness" if you start using an expression and it catches on?
It's an intended bit of irony though. It leverages IP law to keep things as "free" as possible within that regime. In the absence of IP, everything would be in the public domain (although trade secret might still apply to some software?) and the viral nature of the GPL would become irrelevant.
Hmmmmmm.... in fact, the GPL doesn't depend on IP at all, not in any way that matters. Without IP law, the GPL itself would become irrelevant, to wit:
That "nothing else" clause pretty much goes away if copyright goes away. And the goals of the GPL (at least as far as RMS is concerned) are thus achieved.
Actually, in Iowa they make you sign a statement that you actually support the party before you join the caucus meeting. They did in 1984 and 1988 anyway.