I have a Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M) with an old, slow 20G disk in it (original died). It runs W7 better than it did XP, with a minor caveat that you'll suffer slightly longer load times for everything. However, it's more responsive and less prone to the "minor IO = mouse glitching" problems of XP.
The environment Apple falls in isn't so much what makes it not a "UNIX system"; it's also the fact that their software is not stable enough, well suited (scheduler and context switching), or patched -properly- to be considered as a replacement for something like (oh) AIX or a low-end UNIX.
Unfortunately, not exactly. MS will just use RDP. It's a decent enough protocol on its own, and better than many others in its domain.
On the downside for MS, this move will likely mean a bigger focus to find and exploit holes in RDP. Until now, I don't think there have been many (in no small part because RDP has been relegated to internal terminal server use and remote in-house networking - Windows admins don't seem to like it all that much, at least compared to *nix admins who love SSH).
As near as I can tell, there has been almost 0 UNIX marketshare falling to Apple. Apple doesn't make a UNIX; they make a UNIX spec compliant desktop operating system for home users and artistic types - and the associated hardware to go with it.
It's a nice thought, but no. Apple is nowhere near stable or supported enough for that.
To compete with printed books effectively, at least in the 'active reader' context, I see a couple things that need to happen before the devices get wide adoption (ie not just the voracious readers with more money than sense):
* The things need to be cheap, dirt cheap. If they can (essentially) made an embedded system with dual color touchscreens for $200, then they should be able to make a single-display eInk based device for a 4th that that doesn't have all the added gadgetry. (C'mon, dual screens will NOT be a killer feature!) * Ebooks will need to be less than half the cost of the printed version. If I'm going to pay for a digital copy, I'm basically paying for the convenience of doing so over going out to buy a book; it might even be an impulse buy. There is something to be said for not having clutter, but at least with most books, you can sell them online (amazon) for a fair bit more than half the new cost (or you only paid $3 for the book to start with because it was already used). * The ebooks would need to be unencumbered by DRM. If someone wants a book, it's already pretty trivial to find it online in PDF format. People who want to do that are doing that now. Nothing would change if they removed DRM (or didn't add it) to these devices, except ebook purchasers would be able to back up their own books and control their device (as they can their bookshelves today).
It'd be neat if there could be a "social networking site" of sorts set up where rejected patches could be reviewed by the community and kept for posterity. Maybe two rating criteria: implementation merit and concept.
Such a system could allow for someone or someones to come along and make a potentially awesome patch collection and, if there are enough submissions, a completely different kernel.
That said, there's nothing preventing someone from doing this now except for the overhead of digging through all the rejects manually.
May I be the first to say "amen"? I've been very dissatisfied with the 2.6 kernel and its schedulers on the desktop, CFS in particular. CFS seems entirely braindead for desktop use compared to the older schedulers in 2.4 and yes, even 2.2.
A desktop machine needs to be, first and foremost, responsive. If it isn't, it's comparable to the cursor freezing and input taking several seconds to appear: on today's hardware, one might start to think "hey, did it freeze on me?" - completely unacceptable.
Maybe it can be chalked up to the non-priority of X and video at the kernel level; I don't know. Whatever it is, it used to be better, on very pathetic (133MHz) hardware, while doing a lot more (and when such hardware was not all that powerful anymore, as well).
My question is: is it in the kernel tree yet? Is this that 2.6.31 scheduler change I heard about earlier yesterday, or is it something Completely Different?
Oh yeah, and which other scheduler's, if any, did this guy write?
Funny you should mention the 1800s. That's when compulsory public education was initiated in strength amongst the masses.
The first half of the century had the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams at the forefront of political and social discourse. I dare say we're better for it as a society.
It's simple: make schooling required, and allow home schooling. People who give a damn will home school, and good parents typically give a damn. Poor parents will lump their crotch droppings onto the bus when it comes around on the first day of school.
I was driven mad as a child by having to sit in those damn desks for hour after pointless hour. I got in trouble for fidgeting and fooling around on a number of occasions.
Today, I spend a lot of time... sitting on my ass. Just because I couldn't sit still in school does not mean that I didn't learn how to do it. But, more accurately, sitting on my ass in a desk was not the proper educational venue for me as a child (as is often the case with children). They have active minds and bodies; making them sit in a desk, with a dull subject, is punishment.
Teaching to what you know, and to your subjects, is important. Making third graders memorize multiplication tables when you can be teaching them Newtonian physics - by example - is foolish. For one, you won't have to repeat those examples next year if you go the Newtonian physics route, because it's something which will stick with them.
Yeah, that works out well: you use the worst hours of the day - after you've worked a full day, and he's been stuck in a classroom - to actually employ the most useful tools in raising a child to successful adulthood.
Apparently you're not a parent. Kids are tired at night; if they're up at 7AM every day to get on the bus at 8 for school, they're ready for bed by 8 or 9 at the latest. They don't get home until (often) after 4, and the time between getting home and dinner is 1-2 hours. That's when Dad gets home from work, so everyone eats.
Then it's time for about an hour, maybe two hours of family time before they're put in bed. Those two hours have to include things like a bath/shower, brushing teeth, cleaning up, and maybe homework. That's not much time to interact with your kids on a personal level, never mind impart life lessons. Life lessons aren't something which can be conveyed on a schedule.
Yet, the most likely place for a child to be beaten up/in a fight is at school, and most high school graduates can not even do the most trivial of things in life - like balance a checkbook or understand the fine print on a credit card offer. And, as a parent, the most likely place for you to invariably find stupid behavior is in the office or teacher's lounge of a school.
[quote] The very real possibility of some of those stats is that homeschooled kids would be smart in regular school as well. Parent involvement is critical in any education, and the commitment of homeschooling parents is very high. Maybe parents with that commitment level are smarter or work harder and pass those traits on to their kids. [/quote]
So, what you're saying is that it doesn't matter whether a smart kid is home schooled or not - because they'll do well due to parental support either way. And you're saying that parental support is paramount to childhood success. (Surely, with statistical outliers withstanding.) I'd agree.
So why not just let kids be home schooled if their parents will do it?
That's funny in light of the facts. You realize that universities tend to stumble over each other to get home schooled kids into their schools, right? And that there are a significantly higher proportion of home schooled kids who not only go to college than public or private schooled kids, but actually do well once they're there?
I've met 18-year-old home schooled kids who could not only talk over the heads of college professors in their own respective fields, but draw parallels between the various fields which said professors were not even familiar. Yes, there are dim bulbs who do nothing with their lives, but that's true anywhere.
Do you think it's possible to teach someone unwilling or uninterested in learning? What's more, do you think it's wise to penalize those who do want to learn, and are able to do so, just to keep the n'er-do-wells occupied? I don't.
You can't turn a farmer's son into an Einstein unless that child wants to be. A large part of that is up to the parent. But even then, not everyone is born with the ability that someone like Einstein was.
[quote]Why is it that I only hear this from smart kids who whine about having been bored in school?[/quote]
Because the very worst would rather not be there at all, don't pay attention, and might as well not be there? It isn't going to make a bit of difference in their lives, one way or the other, if they can do their multiplication tables. Most of them won't even balance their checkbook.
I'm not saying they don't matter. But if you're going to have a regimented schooling system, you'd better not waste your resources by catering to the lowest common denominator, or even the mediocre - all of which thinks they've got better things to do than learn.
That may be true. But why would anyone become an engineer - say, an automotive engineer - if they don't like to improve cars? Before you can improve on something, you have to understand it. And I don't mean just "understand" it, in a purely intellectual manner. There is more to a gearbox than the gear ratio, torque, and viscosity of the fluid: there's also the real-world application thereof, and how those things work with outside factors.
I guess a mechanic who becomes an engineer might be better described as a scientist.
When I was about 5 or 6, I was curious about electricity. There was one outlet in my parents' bedroom, in the middle of the wall and right at my eye level (it wasn't placed the standard 1' or so above the ground). I still remember his explanation, vaguely.
He said something like "Lights use electricity, which is kind of like a lightning bolt. Except the elecricity that comes from the outlet comes through wires instead of air, and isn't nearly as powerful. It's still very powerful and can hurt you, so you've got to be careful around it."
However, the only reason I remember his explanation is because of what I did next. I think I may have asked him what a shock was, and he explained it as static electricity from the carpet, but worse.
Well, after that, he left the room. I must've waited there looking at the outlet for an hour trying to get the balls up to stick my finger in. I eventually did, very cautiously - and didn't get shocked right away. And just as I was pulling my finger away, I got shocked.
God damn, I will remember that feeling until the day I die.
What you call goofing off, skiving, and truancy is what an unschooler might call being creative, exploring - and simply being a kid. (As an apparent Brit, I would hope that the value of getting in a good fight or coming home late wouldn't be lost on you.)
There's more to life, particularly childhood, than a strictly regimented school schedule. Surely you have seen kids trudging along the streets near dark with a massive bag of books on their back? They're just half way done with their school day, and will be doing homework that night after dinner. That's not a childhood, that's drudgery. It makes absolutely no sense to break a child's spirit with that nonsense.
As someone who is and will be "unschooling" his children (at least in part and to no small degree), let me share my experience. I'm not an expert on education by any stretch of the imagination, but I did attend a total of 3 private schools and 6 public schools, in addition to being home schooled for several years in the K-12 period of my schooling. (I moved around a lot growing up.)
Arguably, a large part of my own home schooling could be qualified as "unschooling" because I didn't spend a great amount of time in specific studies. I had mathematics I had to learn, and I had specific readings. But other than that, I was basically told "find something you enjoy, and learn how to do it - then write about it" or "read a book then we'll talk about it". Stuff like that. Granted, this probably didn't prepare me that well for the mundane, repetitive tasks of the adult world, but I learned a hell of a lot (and often resulted in others accusing me of making shit up).
My take on unschooling is that it's more of a lighthearted philosophy towards education, at least compared to the relatively "hardline" approach taken by modern education institutions (due to its German school heritage). Ask someone like Einstein how well this system works: he had almost as much criticism for it as someone like John Taylor Gatto does.
One difference in the unschooling approach is that children do not need to be "made" to learn. In fact, it assumes the opposite: if you leave a child to his devices, a child will not only learn but learn better than he would have otherwise. Children are not (as Germanic schooling assumes) agents of destruction and near the level of beasts. They've got wild, active imaginations, un-tamable enthusiasm, and a huge font of energy.
The trick to "unschooling" (and it is a trick) is to learn how your child thinks - his likes and dislikes, learning style, and so on - and then help encourage them along an instrumental path. This, believe it or not, involves interacting with your children on a daily basis; it is very rewarding.
My son will be 6 this coming January, and I've been greatly rewarded by the time we've spent together learning. No, he can't read yet. No, he doesn't know his numbers up through 20. But he can write and copy words, recognizes different words, understands capitals and lowercase, and is very good at recognizing patterns. Most importantly, he's curious, and undertakes these things on his own without urging (because we've encouraged him to enjoy doing them). Oh, and he can do a hell of a lot of things most kids can't do today: pick out constellations; track an animal by its footprints (sorta - he is only 6); identify the animals that belong to those footprints; and a number of other things.
Something as simple as a trip to the lake in the center of town can be used to help teach. After he'd spent 2 hours this afternoon helping me put up fliers (willingly and capably, I might add - he demonstrated wonderful adult etiquette in interactions), I took him there.
He wanted to chase the ducks and the geese. We took a moment to look at the animals; we talked as friends. I said it looked like a great day to go fishing (it was); he said "let's!" - but we couldn't, because I didn't have a license. I asked him if he remembered the difference between the different types of ducks and geese (we'd talked ab
Their sample size was outrageously small, and then they padded their figures based on their presumptions/desired result.
Example: out of myself and three of my friends, all of us smoke. None of us have lung cancer. So, by extension, you can imply that smoking does not cause lung cancer in 100% of those studied, and using the metrics of the topic's study, we can imply that there is no lung cancer in America, because 100% of smokers do not have lung cancer.
It's weak, but it's the same basic thing. It's rife with logical fallacy.
As someone who seems to be professionally unemployed (and, apparently, applying to the wrong jobs/companies), let me share my experience with interview tests.
Basically, I've experienced three basic problems with tests. They are:
1) Tests/questions which have absolutely nothing to do with the posted questions - eg. desktop support type questions for a developer position, and other similar absurdities. 2) Tests which ask information that you would only come into contact with if you did that exact, specific job, or one very similar to it, currently or recently - and even in that case, things which are on the fringe of common/daily tasks. For instance: writing a script (on paper) in VBscript to collect CPU performance metrics. This kind of thing is going to clean out a lot of competent, skilled candidates. 3) Tests which are very good, but I did poorly on due to insufficient specific domain experience/knowledge. However, given the nature of the position, the questions were overly complex/indepth. Eg. 4) Tests which are actually very good, relate to both the advertised job description and the position as it is understood. These are the ones I've done well on, invariably. 5) Thought-process/problem solving exams. These are also very good. They contain hypothetical technical scenarios, psuedocode/classes and the like to see how quickly/well you solve problems.
A large part of it depends on your specific niche experience and expertise. The #4 "very good" tests were, admittedly, right up my alley as I'd applied for those specific jobs due to familiarity with the topics. I'd say that, if you can pull #4 and/or #5 off, don't worry to much about whether people turn you down.
Honestly, I wish more employers would do pre-interview skill assessment tests. I'd have a much better chance of landing a job, if that were the case. There are entirely too many bullshitters out there holding (partially due to managerial/bureaucratic incompetence), applying for, and getting jobs in IT (largely due to the very nature of how rapidly things in IT change). Buzzword compliance/insistence is a bit of a contributing factor as well, I'm sure.
I know that I -have- overlooked positions due to a required 'test' before, though. They've been jobs where I know I can do the job, and likely be fully up to speed within a week or two (at least as the job has been conveyed - I adapt quickly), but the IT Manager has some sort of over-inflated idea of what the position entails (and I know I won't get the position) or it's evidence of an over-inflated company bureaucracy. I can see (and have seen) both those things scare people away regardless of competency.
Oh yeah, and don't be one of those pricks who makes a person take a test before you've actually reviewed their application, or after they've shown up for an interview. Please.
If your test doesn't suck, you're prompt in replying to employees you are interested in, and make the test accessible to them (ie before traveling to interview), I see no reason why you shouldn't keep testing.
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I have a Thinkpad X30 (1.2GHz P3M, 512M) with an old, slow 20G disk in it (original died). It runs W7 better than it did XP, with a minor caveat that you'll suffer slightly longer load times for everything. However, it's more responsive and less prone to the "minor IO = mouse glitching" problems of XP.
The environment Apple falls in isn't so much what makes it not a "UNIX system"; it's also the fact that their software is not stable enough, well suited (scheduler and context switching), or patched -properly- to be considered as a replacement for something like (oh) AIX or a low-end UNIX.
How the hell is this 'troll'? This is a potential (probable) implication of broader exposure.
Unfortunately, not exactly. MS will just use RDP. It's a decent enough protocol on its own, and better than many others in its domain.
On the downside for MS, this move will likely mean a bigger focus to find and exploit holes in RDP. Until now, I don't think there have been many (in no small part because RDP has been relegated to internal terminal server use and remote in-house networking - Windows admins don't seem to like it all that much, at least compared to *nix admins who love SSH).
Are you serious?
As near as I can tell, there has been almost 0 UNIX marketshare falling to Apple. Apple doesn't make a UNIX; they make a UNIX spec compliant desktop operating system for home users and artistic types - and the associated hardware to go with it.
It's a nice thought, but no. Apple is nowhere near stable or supported enough for that.
To compete with printed books effectively, at least in the 'active reader' context, I see a couple things that need to happen before the devices get wide adoption (ie not just the voracious readers with more money than sense):
* The things need to be cheap, dirt cheap. If they can (essentially) made an embedded system with dual color touchscreens for $200, then they should be able to make a single-display eInk based device for a 4th that that doesn't have all the added gadgetry. (C'mon, dual screens will NOT be a killer feature!)
* Ebooks will need to be less than half the cost of the printed version. If I'm going to pay for a digital copy, I'm basically paying for the convenience of doing so over going out to buy a book; it might even be an impulse buy. There is something to be said for not having clutter, but at least with most books, you can sell them online (amazon) for a fair bit more than half the new cost (or you only paid $3 for the book to start with because it was already used).
* The ebooks would need to be unencumbered by DRM. If someone wants a book, it's already pretty trivial to find it online in PDF format. People who want to do that are doing that now. Nothing would change if they removed DRM (or didn't add it) to these devices, except ebook purchasers would be able to back up their own books and control their device (as they can their bookshelves today).
It'd be neat if there could be a "social networking site" of sorts set up where rejected patches could be reviewed by the community and kept for posterity. Maybe two rating criteria: implementation merit and concept.
Such a system could allow for someone or someones to come along and make a potentially awesome patch collection and, if there are enough submissions, a completely different kernel.
That said, there's nothing preventing someone from doing this now except for the overhead of digging through all the rejects manually.
May I be the first to say "amen"? I've been very dissatisfied with the 2.6 kernel and its schedulers on the desktop, CFS in particular. CFS seems entirely braindead for desktop use compared to the older schedulers in 2.4 and yes, even 2.2.
A desktop machine needs to be, first and foremost, responsive. If it isn't, it's comparable to the cursor freezing and input taking several seconds to appear: on today's hardware, one might start to think "hey, did it freeze on me?" - completely unacceptable.
Maybe it can be chalked up to the non-priority of X and video at the kernel level; I don't know. Whatever it is, it used to be better, on very pathetic (133MHz) hardware, while doing a lot more (and when such hardware was not all that powerful anymore, as well).
My question is: is it in the kernel tree yet? Is this that 2.6.31 scheduler change I heard about earlier yesterday, or is it something Completely Different?
Oh yeah, and which other scheduler's, if any, did this guy write?
Social retards? Uh, yeah. That was me. :P
Funny you should mention the 1800s. That's when compulsory public education was initiated in strength amongst the masses.
The first half of the century had the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams at the forefront of political and social discourse. I dare say we're better for it as a society.
It's simple: make schooling required, and allow home schooling. People who give a damn will home school, and good parents typically give a damn. Poor parents will lump their crotch droppings onto the bus when it comes around on the first day of school.
I was driven mad as a child by having to sit in those damn desks for hour after pointless hour. I got in trouble for fidgeting and fooling around on a number of occasions.
Today, I spend a lot of time... sitting on my ass. Just because I couldn't sit still in school does not mean that I didn't learn how to do it. But, more accurately, sitting on my ass in a desk was not the proper educational venue for me as a child (as is often the case with children). They have active minds and bodies; making them sit in a desk, with a dull subject, is punishment.
Teaching to what you know, and to your subjects, is important. Making third graders memorize multiplication tables when you can be teaching them Newtonian physics - by example - is foolish. For one, you won't have to repeat those examples next year if you go the Newtonian physics route, because it's something which will stick with them.
Yeah, that works out well: you use the worst hours of the day - after you've worked a full day, and he's been stuck in a classroom - to actually employ the most useful tools in raising a child to successful adulthood.
Apparently you're not a parent. Kids are tired at night; if they're up at 7AM every day to get on the bus at 8 for school, they're ready for bed by 8 or 9 at the latest. They don't get home until (often) after 4, and the time between getting home and dinner is 1-2 hours. That's when Dad gets home from work, so everyone eats.
Then it's time for about an hour, maybe two hours of family time before they're put in bed. Those two hours have to include things like a bath/shower, brushing teeth, cleaning up, and maybe homework. That's not much time to interact with your kids on a personal level, never mind impart life lessons. Life lessons aren't something which can be conveyed on a schedule.
Yet, the most likely place for a child to be beaten up/in a fight is at school, and most high school graduates can not even do the most trivial of things in life - like balance a checkbook or understand the fine print on a credit card offer. And, as a parent, the most likely place for you to invariably find stupid behavior is in the office or teacher's lounge of a school.
[quote]
The very real possibility of some of those stats is that homeschooled kids would be smart in regular school as well. Parent involvement is critical in any education, and the commitment of homeschooling parents is very high. Maybe parents with that commitment level are smarter or work harder and pass those traits on to their kids. [/quote]
So, what you're saying is that it doesn't matter whether a smart kid is home schooled or not - because they'll do well due to parental support either way. And you're saying that parental support is paramount to childhood success. (Surely, with statistical outliers withstanding.) I'd agree.
So why not just let kids be home schooled if their parents will do it?
Between 86th and 92nd in every subject? Damn, I really was an over-achiever. My lows were around 95, everything else was in 98th.
That's funny in light of the facts. You realize that universities tend to stumble over each other to get home schooled kids into their schools, right? And that there are a significantly higher proportion of home schooled kids who not only go to college than public or private schooled kids, but actually do well once they're there?
I've met 18-year-old home schooled kids who could not only talk over the heads of college professors in their own respective fields, but draw parallels between the various fields which said professors were not even familiar. Yes, there are dim bulbs who do nothing with their lives, but that's true anywhere.
Do you think it's possible to teach someone unwilling or uninterested in learning? What's more, do you think it's wise to penalize those who do want to learn, and are able to do so, just to keep the n'er-do-wells occupied? I don't.
You can't turn a farmer's son into an Einstein unless that child wants to be. A large part of that is up to the parent. But even then, not everyone is born with the ability that someone like Einstein was.
[quote]Why is it that I only hear this from smart kids who whine about having been bored in school?[/quote]
Because the very worst would rather not be there at all, don't pay attention, and might as well not be there? It isn't going to make a bit of difference in their lives, one way or the other, if they can do their multiplication tables. Most of them won't even balance their checkbook.
I'm not saying they don't matter. But if you're going to have a regimented schooling system, you'd better not waste your resources by catering to the lowest common denominator, or even the mediocre - all of which thinks they've got better things to do than learn.
That may be true. But why would anyone become an engineer - say, an automotive engineer - if they don't like to improve cars? Before you can improve on something, you have to understand it. And I don't mean just "understand" it, in a purely intellectual manner. There is more to a gearbox than the gear ratio, torque, and viscosity of the fluid: there's also the real-world application thereof, and how those things work with outside factors.
I guess a mechanic who becomes an engineer might be better described as a scientist.
When I was about 5 or 6, I was curious about electricity. There was one outlet in my parents' bedroom, in the middle of the wall and right at my eye level (it wasn't placed the standard 1' or so above the ground). I still remember his explanation, vaguely.
He said something like "Lights use electricity, which is kind of like a lightning bolt. Except the elecricity that comes from the outlet comes through wires instead of air, and isn't nearly as powerful. It's still very powerful and can hurt you, so you've got to be careful around it."
However, the only reason I remember his explanation is because of what I did next. I think I may have asked him what a shock was, and he explained it as static electricity from the carpet, but worse.
Well, after that, he left the room. I must've waited there looking at the outlet for an hour trying to get the balls up to stick my finger in. I eventually did, very cautiously - and didn't get shocked right away. And just as I was pulling my finger away, I got shocked.
God damn, I will remember that feeling until the day I die.
What you call goofing off, skiving, and truancy is what an unschooler might call being creative, exploring - and simply being a kid. (As an apparent Brit, I would hope that the value of getting in a good fight or coming home late wouldn't be lost on you.)
There's more to life, particularly childhood, than a strictly regimented school schedule. Surely you have seen kids trudging along the streets near dark with a massive bag of books on their back? They're just half way done with their school day, and will be doing homework that night after dinner. That's not a childhood, that's drudgery. It makes absolutely no sense to break a child's spirit with that nonsense.
As someone who is and will be "unschooling" his children (at least in part and to no small degree), let me share my experience. I'm not an expert on education by any stretch of the imagination, but I did attend a total of 3 private schools and 6 public schools, in addition to being home schooled for several years in the K-12 period of my schooling. (I moved around a lot growing up.)
Arguably, a large part of my own home schooling could be qualified as "unschooling" because I didn't spend a great amount of time in specific studies. I had mathematics I had to learn, and I had specific readings. But other than that, I was basically told "find something you enjoy, and learn how to do it - then write about it" or "read a book then we'll talk about it". Stuff like that. Granted, this probably didn't prepare me that well for the mundane, repetitive tasks of the adult world, but I learned a hell of a lot (and often resulted in others accusing me of making shit up).
My take on unschooling is that it's more of a lighthearted philosophy towards education, at least compared to the relatively "hardline" approach taken by modern education institutions (due to its German school heritage). Ask someone like Einstein how well this system works: he had almost as much criticism for it as someone like John Taylor Gatto does.
One difference in the unschooling approach is that children do not need to be "made" to learn. In fact, it assumes the opposite: if you leave a child to his devices, a child will not only learn but learn better than he would have otherwise. Children are not (as Germanic schooling assumes) agents of destruction and near the level of beasts. They've got wild, active imaginations, un-tamable enthusiasm, and a huge font of energy.
The trick to "unschooling" (and it is a trick) is to learn how your child thinks - his likes and dislikes, learning style, and so on - and then help encourage them along an instrumental path. This, believe it or not, involves interacting with your children on a daily basis; it is very rewarding.
My son will be 6 this coming January, and I've been greatly rewarded by the time we've spent together learning. No, he can't read yet. No, he doesn't know his numbers up through 20. But he can write and copy words, recognizes different words, understands capitals and lowercase, and is very good at recognizing patterns. Most importantly, he's curious, and undertakes these things on his own without urging (because we've encouraged him to enjoy doing them). Oh, and he can do a hell of a lot of things most kids can't do today: pick out constellations; track an animal by its footprints (sorta - he is only 6); identify the animals that belong to those footprints; and a number of other things.
Something as simple as a trip to the lake in the center of town can be used to help teach. After he'd spent 2 hours this afternoon helping me put up fliers (willingly and capably, I might add - he demonstrated wonderful adult etiquette in interactions), I took him there.
He wanted to chase the ducks and the geese. We took a moment to look at the animals; we talked as friends. I said it looked like a great day to go fishing (it was); he said "let's!" - but we couldn't, because I didn't have a license. I asked him if he remembered the difference between the different types of ducks and geese (we'd talked ab
Their sample size was outrageously small, and then they padded their figures based on their presumptions/desired result.
Example: out of myself and three of my friends, all of us smoke. None of us have lung cancer. So, by extension, you can imply that smoking does not cause lung cancer in 100% of those studied, and using the metrics of the topic's study, we can imply that there is no lung cancer in America, because 100% of smokers do not have lung cancer.
It's weak, but it's the same basic thing. It's rife with logical fallacy.
As someone who seems to be professionally unemployed (and, apparently, applying to the wrong jobs/companies), let me share my experience with interview tests.
Basically, I've experienced three basic problems with tests. They are:
1) Tests/questions which have absolutely nothing to do with the posted questions - eg. desktop support type questions for a developer position, and other similar absurdities.
2) Tests which ask information that you would only come into contact with if you did that exact, specific job, or one very similar to it, currently or recently - and even in that case, things which are on the fringe of common/daily tasks. For instance: writing a script (on paper) in VBscript to collect CPU performance metrics. This kind of thing is going to clean out a lot of competent, skilled candidates.
3) Tests which are very good, but I did poorly on due to insufficient specific domain experience/knowledge. However, given the nature of the position, the questions were overly complex/indepth. Eg.
4) Tests which are actually very good, relate to both the advertised job description and the position as it is understood. These are the ones I've done well on, invariably.
5) Thought-process/problem solving exams. These are also very good. They contain hypothetical technical scenarios, psuedocode/classes and the like to see how quickly/well you solve problems.
A large part of it depends on your specific niche experience and expertise. The #4 "very good" tests were, admittedly, right up my alley as I'd applied for those specific jobs due to familiarity with the topics. I'd say that, if you can pull #4 and/or #5 off, don't worry to much about whether people turn you down.
Honestly, I wish more employers would do pre-interview skill assessment tests. I'd have a much better chance of landing a job, if that were the case. There are entirely too many bullshitters out there holding (partially due to managerial/bureaucratic incompetence), applying for, and getting jobs in IT (largely due to the very nature of how rapidly things in IT change). Buzzword compliance/insistence is a bit of a contributing factor as well, I'm sure.
I know that I -have- overlooked positions due to a required 'test' before, though. They've been jobs where I know I can do the job, and likely be fully up to speed within a week or two (at least as the job has been conveyed - I adapt quickly), but the IT Manager has some sort of over-inflated idea of what the position entails (and I know I won't get the position) or it's evidence of an over-inflated company bureaucracy. I can see (and have seen) both those things scare people away regardless of competency.
Oh yeah, and don't be one of those pricks who makes a person take a test before you've actually reviewed their application, or after they've shown up for an interview. Please.
If your test doesn't suck, you're prompt in replying to employees you are interested in, and make the test accessible to them (ie before traveling to interview), I see no reason why you shouldn't keep testing.
You cloak to them? I found I've become a bigger target.