I've been learning Japanese for the past 7 years, three years in college courses (taught by native Japanese speakers) and the past couple of years on my own given the basics I got from the college courses. I've been to Japan three times now, and just got back from a month-long stay in Tokyo. I was able to make my way and hold some simple casual conversations with native speakers, but probably embarrassed myself a few times by still not getting the right word, or stopping to remember a word. I managed to do things like interact with the Japan Post employees and many others who had no English at all. It was very nice being able to make a connection and communicate with others in their language, and in some ways the old saw about "thinking in the other language is important" is true.
I've been reading and studying every day for at least an hour, reading manga and watching anime with subtitles off. It helped, since I don't really have access to native speakers now (time and distance constraints). If I didn't enjoy Japanese culture though, I wouldn't be making the effort. Motivation and a goal helps.
Get rid of the laws that favor one or two big companies in an industry.
"Get rid of all laws" as a response to "some laws are bad" is the mark of a demagogue or an idiot.
There are a lot of places that have critical in-house software developed through the years on Windows, and so they have to continue with the platform, because it would eat into profits to pay for porting it to other OSs.
Environmentalists who want to limit the amount of Earth that people take up and "waste". Better to live cheek-by-jowl in tiny apartments connected by "mass transit" than to allow free-range humans to wander the world in their SUVs, dropping babies and plastic grocery bags at random, while spewing greenhouse gasses and burning Mother Gaia's black blood.
Who are you to demand that I "renounce [my] belief because it is without support"? Why in fact should I do anything you say? You want to believe or don't want to believe, either way is your choice, just like it's my choice. My belief should have no effect on you, unless you choose to make it so. I'm not going to come to your home and hold a gun to your head or sword on your neck, demanding conversion to my faith, I expect equal treatment from you deniers. Oh, sure, you can say whatever you want about me or my belief, but don't expect to demand your way, with your "renounce your belief because it is without support" to have any effect on me or anyone else.
That's called "liberty" and it's precious these days because it's increasingly rare...
I was taught in high school that one day powerful computers handling thousands of calculations per second would be shrunk down to the size of a typical closet!... you insensitive ageist clods!
I passed the half-century mark a few years ago, and been doing "maintenance" on an evolving system. When I started my career 30 years ago I was a developer who worked on all the phases from requirements to delivery on over a dozen radically different systems (satellite download analysis, AI, document management, network diagnostics), but I burned out pretty severely by about 35.
What I've discovered is that I am now more interested in finding and solving the problems than I am in creating "new" systems that are basically re-hashes of the "new" systems from decades past. The languages and OS's change, but the requirements seldom do.
But, since users are even more creative in breaking systems than developers are in designing and building them, it's important to be able to find out where the developer missed something, or why the user decided to not follow the business rules they swore to the requirements team they always follow.
The project I'm on has a "new development" team which is tasked with implementing the fixes my team recommends, and which develops new functionality that the end-user requires. I've been able to make it clear to upper management that Operations and Maintenance is just as much a stake-holder in the design of a system as the end-user, and in fact have requirements that are just as important.
Case in point: An early version of the system (web-based app) would crash, with a "500" error and Java stack trace which was displayed to the user. This was very handy for us in O&M as it allowed the user to send us useful information about the state of the server. Unfortunately, someone in Architecture felt that the user would be confused or unable to continue working if they saw this "horrible" report. So, they decided to replace the "500" pages with a generic "An error has occurred. Contact the help desk if it continues".
Unfortunately, there is no message that the user could pass on to us via trouble ticket, we are now left to try to figure out where the error occurred, what the error was, and what the user did to create it. Even more unfortunately, the developers never bothered to log the exception stack anywhere, and so we're stuck with the equivalent of the old joke, "Doctor it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do that!" and trying to figure out what's going on by intuition and experience.
It was hilarious once the development team had to try to support the system during a major deployment, and they discovered just what we "mere maintenance" people go through every day. Needless to say, they were not happy with actually *using* the code they had written and trying to track down what caused the problems the users found. I think they understand now that reporting an error is more than just saying "an error occurred", and so they're going to start reporting somewhat more specific errors, at least something the user can copy/paste into a trouble ticket.
So, TL;DR, maintenance is more like enjoying solving a mystery or following a forensic post-mortem than creating a painting or writing a song, but it is creative, just in different ways, and doesn't have to be the "dead end" that young developers see it as.
Not to mention the people "escaping" but within a few miles of the chunk of Earth "blasting away" and surviving with only mussed hair and dirty clothes...
I grew up in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and it took quite a few years before it was determined that the valley was actually the remnants of a meteor crater. I remember going past the huge USGS map that hung along one wall of the mall and seeing the obvious circular shape of the valley, especially when the kinds of rocks were identified with different colors, it formed a definite bulls-eye. Most noticable was the description of "shocked quartz" in the valley rocks, and the small raised area in the center of the valley. It seemed obvious to this science geek at the time, but there were still a lot of geologists claiming it might have been volcanic, or a giant sinkhole. The valley is hard to determine by eye, even in Google Maps, but the Defense Mapping Elevation data showed it pretty plainly.
I think Middlesboro can claim to be the only town located inside a meteor crater, but I'm not sure.
Slashdot Mirror
At 90, can anything really surprise him anymore, given what he's seen and lived through?
Plus anything having to do with "nukyular" is going to raise a poisonous cloud of nukeFUD that will dissuade anyone from pursuing the technology.
I've been learning Japanese for the past 7 years, three years in college courses (taught by native Japanese speakers) and the past couple of years on my own given the basics I got from the college courses. I've been to Japan three times now, and just got back from a month-long stay in Tokyo. I was able to make my way and hold some simple casual conversations with native speakers, but probably embarrassed myself a few times by still not getting the right word, or stopping to remember a word. I managed to do things like interact with the Japan Post employees and many others who had no English at all. It was very nice being able to make a connection and communicate with others in their language, and in some ways the old saw about "thinking in the other language is important" is true.
I've been reading and studying every day for at least an hour, reading manga and watching anime with subtitles off. It helped, since I don't really have access to native speakers now (time and distance constraints). If I didn't enjoy Japanese culture though, I wouldn't be making the effort. Motivation and a goal helps.
BTW I started studying when I was 47.
Get rid of the laws that favor one or two big companies in an industry. "Get rid of all laws" as a response to "some laws are bad" is the mark of a demagogue or an idiot.
... fire hot, water wet. GIFs at 11.
And if I hear "well if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about" one more time from these apologists...
It's okay, the German chemical weapons will be solar powered and wind-triggered.
How about blowing up a semi-trailer full of smoke detectors, sitting on a bridge upwind of some city?
So what was their excuse for the 1100-odd years before there was a "toxic US policy?"
When the US was on the gold standard, there was still inflation.
Some of us have known this for a long time. We're all forked...
Apparently so, since you don't seem to want to pay for the experience you claim to value.
Hiring managers don't do that kind of math.
There are a lot of places that have critical in-house software developed through the years on Windows, and so they have to continue with the platform, because it would eat into profits to pay for porting it to other OSs.
Environmentalists who want to limit the amount of Earth that people take up and "waste". Better to live cheek-by-jowl in tiny apartments connected by "mass transit" than to allow free-range humans to wander the world in their SUVs, dropping babies and plastic grocery bags at random, while spewing greenhouse gasses and burning Mother Gaia's black blood.
Or some such.
Who are you to demand that I "renounce [my] belief because it is without support"? Why in fact should I do anything you say? You want to believe or don't want to believe, either way is your choice, just like it's my choice. My belief should have no effect on you, unless you choose to make it so. I'm not going to come to your home and hold a gun to your head or sword on your neck, demanding conversion to my faith, I expect equal treatment from you deniers. Oh, sure, you can say whatever you want about me or my belief, but don't expect to demand your way, with your "renounce your belief because it is without support" to have any effect on me or anyone else.
That's called "liberty" and it's precious these days because it's increasingly rare...
I was taught in high school that one day powerful computers handling thousands of calculations per second would be shrunk down to the size of a typical closet! ... you insensitive ageist clods!
(that was a joke, by the way)
I passed the half-century mark a few years ago, and been doing "maintenance" on an evolving system. When I started my career 30 years ago I was a developer who worked on all the phases from requirements to delivery on over a dozen radically different systems (satellite download analysis, AI, document management, network diagnostics), but I burned out pretty severely by about 35.
What I've discovered is that I am now more interested in finding and solving the problems than I am in creating "new" systems that are basically re-hashes of the "new" systems from decades past. The languages and OS's change, but the requirements seldom do.
But, since users are even more creative in breaking systems than developers are in designing and building them, it's important to be able to find out where the developer missed something, or why the user decided to not follow the business rules they swore to the requirements team they always follow.
The project I'm on has a "new development" team which is tasked with implementing the fixes my team recommends, and which develops new functionality that the end-user requires. I've been able to make it clear to upper management that Operations and Maintenance is just as much a stake-holder in the design of a system as the end-user, and in fact have requirements that are just as important.
Case in point: An early version of the system (web-based app) would crash, with a "500" error and Java stack trace which was displayed to the user. This was very handy for us in O&M as it allowed the user to send us useful information about the state of the server. Unfortunately, someone in Architecture felt that the user would be confused or unable to continue working if they saw this "horrible" report. So, they decided to replace the "500" pages with a generic "An error has occurred. Contact the help desk if it continues".
Unfortunately, there is no message that the user could pass on to us via trouble ticket, we are now left to try to figure out where the error occurred, what the error was, and what the user did to create it. Even more unfortunately, the developers never bothered to log the exception stack anywhere, and so we're stuck with the equivalent of the old joke, "Doctor it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do that!" and trying to figure out what's going on by intuition and experience.
It was hilarious once the development team had to try to support the system during a major deployment, and they discovered just what we "mere maintenance" people go through every day. Needless to say, they were not happy with actually *using* the code they had written and trying to track down what caused the problems the users found. I think they understand now that reporting an error is more than just saying "an error occurred", and so they're going to start reporting somewhat more specific errors, at least something the user can copy/paste into a trouble ticket.
So, TL;DR, maintenance is more like enjoying solving a mystery or following a forensic post-mortem than creating a painting or writing a song, but it is creative, just in different ways, and doesn't have to be the "dead end" that young developers see it as.
Not to mention the people "escaping" but within a few miles of the chunk of Earth "blasting away" and surviving with only mussed hair and dirty clothes...
Snap!
I for one welcome our veganivorous overlords...
Except it's your crowd that's giving *everyone* HIV, no matter how you try to justify it.
You're from Vega? What orbit?
Translation:
"My hovercraft is full of eels."
I grew up in Middlesboro, Kentucky, and it took quite a few years before it was determined that the valley was actually the remnants of a meteor crater. I remember going past the huge USGS map that hung along one wall of the mall and seeing the obvious circular shape of the valley, especially when the kinds of rocks were identified with different colors, it formed a definite bulls-eye. Most noticable was the description of "shocked quartz" in the valley rocks, and the small raised area in the center of the valley. It seemed obvious to this science geek at the time, but there were still a lot of geologists claiming it might have been volcanic, or a giant sinkhole. The valley is hard to determine by eye, even in Google Maps, but the Defense Mapping Elevation data showed it pretty plainly.
I think Middlesboro can claim to be the only town located inside a meteor crater, but I'm not sure.